The thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think. But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.
When you say things like "explanations are based on prior explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand. Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of course. But they can also be non-explanatory. And some explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.) But the foundation is that we all have the same basic hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon. Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†]) seems like it's just crying out for something like "construction". Reading it feels like watching someone struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue". [†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with *generates*, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling. On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, [email protected] wrote: > [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser falling behind a book > ...] > Working through thought-experiments like the one above leads us to conclude > that all descriptions, particularly satisfying ones, are inevitably > explanatory and that all explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot > explain something until you have something to explain – so all explanations > must be based on prior descriptions. The only reasonable conclusion, if you > take both of these claims at face value, is that all explanations are based > on prior explanations! The distinction between description and explanation > concerns their position in an argument, not their objectivity or subjectivity > in some enduring sense. Whether a statement is explanatory or descriptive > depends upon the understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her > audience at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are explanations > that the speaker and the audience take to be true for the purpose of seeking > further explanations/.[1] <#_ftn1> -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
