• Corpus ID: 47951938

A. Gopnik (2000). Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Understanding: the Evolution, Function and Phenomenology of the Theory-formation System. in F. Keil & I Am Very Grateful for Helpful Discussions With

@inproceedings{Keil2009AG,
  title={A. Gopnik (2000). Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Understanding: the Evolution, Function and Phenomenology of the Theory-formation System. in F. Keil \& I Am Very Grateful for Helpful Discussions With},
  author={Frank C. Keil},
  year={2009}
}

• F. Keil
• Published 2009
• Philosophy

Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal knowledge: The function, evolution and phenomenology of the theory-formation system. There is a lust of the mind, that, by a perserverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of carnal pleasure. What is explanation? Both our ordinary everyday concept of explanation and refinements of the concept in the philosophy of science seem to have a curiously circular quality. Theories are good because they explain things, but explaining things turns out to be an awful lot like having theories of them. We explain something, we are told, when we characterize it in terms of some set of abstract underlying laws and entities. But this characterization seems to reduce to having a theory itself. Alternatively, we may say that we explain something when it satisfies our explanation-seeking curiosity. But then explanation-seeking curiosity seems only to be definable as that curiosity which explanation satisfies. The ordinary concept of explanation seems to involve both a kind of knowledge, hence the link to theories, and also a distinctive phenomenology, hence the link to the feeling of curiosity. This sort of amalgam of cognition and phenomenology is quite characteristic of our ordinary folk psychological concepts, of course. What I want to propose in this paper is not really a further explication of either our ordinary notion of explanation or the notion as it is used in science. In particular, I do not think there is some set of necessary and sufficient features that will account for all the things we call " explanation " , anymore than there is a set of necessary and sufficient features that will account for all the things we call " bird ". Instead, I want to suggest that the everyday notion of explanation might be a jumping off point for a non-circular and 3 interesting cognitive concept of explanation. Moreover, thinking about explanation suggests some interesting, if still untested, hypotheses about how our cognitive system might work. The concept of explanation I will propose, like the everyday concept, includes both cognitive and phenomenological elements but I will propose a particular, and more precise, relation between them. I will suggest that explanation may be understood as the distinctive phenomenological mark of the operation of a special representational system. I will call this system the theory-formation system. This system was designed by evolution to construct what I …