Limita Explicarii: Urmind "De Ce"-ul pina la Terminusul sau Epistemologic

Doream sa fac un update al ultimei dezbateri dintre Bush si Kerry din aceasta seara, dar dind intimplator de articolul de mai sus al Marinei Ludwigs din Anthropoetics, m-am decis sa public mai degraba un link catre acesta pe blog. Iata mai jos pe scurt despre ce este vorba in el:

In this essay I will examine the theory and praxis of explanation and demonstrate the unsustainable character of its claims and underlying presuppositions. My involvement in this project stemmed originally from my interest in contributing to a development of a formal methodology in the humanities......
As we make a transition to less precise disciplines--first to the social sciences, then to the humanities--the role of explanation and prediction grows progressively more dim. In the humanities, we no longer expect perfect predictive validity from theoretical claims, but this does not mean that the explanatory principle has been rendered irrelevant. Although the use of the term "explanation" itself is not as explicit as it is in science, the explanatory enterprise still serves as the animating impetus behind many activities. Whether tracing through textual interpretation how a text can be brought into a correspondence with another text, or engaging in deconstructive and cultural criticism informed by the workings of language, we implicitly assume that the insights we have gleaned from our analyses have more than just local value. We expect, in fact, that in some way, they have broadened our understanding of the subject and that the next time around, we will be shrewder at spotting pertinent rhetorical figures or semantic features. We still aim at some regularity of knowledge, still hanker after some sort of an illumination. But predictiveness of the humanistic kind is loose and empirically contingent on given context, in contradistinction to reliable predictions supplied by scientific theories. And what form is our illumination to take? What kind of an understanding can we cull from the imprecise humanistic disciplines? If what we know is not sufficiently general or categorizable to yield a cogent prediction under some systematic method of interrogation, can it still be summarized and conveyed in an explanation, and if so, to what kind of an explanation would it beamenable?.......

In the following argument, I will present an overview of the existing theories of explanation in philosophy of science together with their critique, followed by a concluding section on the anthropological implications of the explanatory discourse’s failure, which I will connect to some relevant theoretical points of generative anthropology. Those who wish to skip the technical part can fast-forward to the last subdivision of this article, entitled "The Anthropological Content." Alternatively, those who do not want to wade through the entire technical argument but want to get some idea about the limit of explanation should go directly to the section on "The Breakdown of Functional and Genetic Explanations." I have structured my exposition historically, starting with the two standard competing accounts of explanation--those of the covering law and of causation, represented by Carl Hempel and Wesley Salmon, respectively. I then follow with several alternative explanatory paradigms--the pragmatic model of Bas van Fraassen, the capacities model of Nancy Cartwright, and the schematic account of Philip Kitcher. Finally, I present functional and genetic explanations in evolutionary biology, exemplified by the views of Larry Wright and Robert Cummings. I dwell on these theories in great detail, because I view them as crucial for understanding how a scientific issue becomes a problematic in the humanities........