According to a couple of dictionaries, an `explanation’ is “Something that explains” or equivalent definitions of the sort which would gain a failing grade on a junior high school test back in the days when American schools were so tough we had to write essays explaining how it was possible to walk uphill going to and from school.
According to a highly respected textbook, Theoretical Physics by George Joos with the collaboration of Ira M Freeman, an explanation provides “a reference back to simpler elements.” This is more solid but needs elaboration and more than a little expansion to cover fields beyond physics and similar sciences; in fact, a bit of expansion is needed to cover such `philosophical’ sub-fields of physics such as cosmology and also the truly fundamental sort of work done by Newton and Maxwell and Einstein and the founders of quantum physics. (I will return to the sub-topic of explanations in physics in a short while, without pretending to `solve’ longstanding problems but only the (Thomistic) intent of putting physics and other such fields of study in the context of more general human thought.)
Even within physics, such an explanation—“a reference back to simpler elements.”—relies on much conceptual, linguistic, methodological, and other apparatuses; there is much that could be labeled cultural capital in each of Newton’s simple laws. Without the entire history of ancient Greek philosophy and its battles to learn how to develop proper words and concepts and methods for abstract reasoning, without Euclid and Archimedes, without Ptolemy (whose `model’ of the Solar System was arguably the first such large-scale mathematical-physical model), without a multitude of philosophical and literary thinkers from Christian and Jewish and Moslem cultures, without the empirical thinkers and doers of the Middle Ages, Newton’s laws make no sense. Civilized thinkers realize this. Barbarian children who think the world is transparent to human thought and human language—many modern scientists and too many teachers and cultural leaders among others are such barbarian children—think that Newton’s laws, the US Constitution, ancient Christian creeds, and other complex encapsulations of thought mean exactly what they `seem’ to mean. Such an understanding of understanding is thoroughly incoherent, but we’ll gradually get to a better understanding.
When we explain something substantial, we’re a bit like acrobats who support ourselves by standing upon our own heads, but mostly we, as individuals and as communal beings, stand upon our communal heads. We rely upon not so much our individual intelligences but our intellects as defined by Jacques Barzun:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
There is much more to be said. I’m trying to understand understanding within the context of my worldview and doing so in a somewhat arbitrary way, but that is also the nature of human thought. We are blessed and sometimes cursed by the personal aspects of the thought left to us by Plato and Augustine and Dante and Shakespeare as well as Newton and Faraday and Einstein.
We are embedded in a world of particulars including particular men and women and other creatures; we are further embedded along with our world in a greater Creation of realms of abstract and particular or concrete being.
I’ll be writing more about explanations and trying to write in such a way as to provide digestible pieces as part of a long-delayed effort to try to make my worldview more accessible. As is often the case with me, it is a quite idiosyncratic way to move forward and a way decided upon by a seeming impulse after thinking hard about the problem for years. I’m bound to be idiosyncratic even when I’m working in a field seeming suited for systematic thinking—after all, I’m a philosopher and theologian who writes novels even when I’m writing philosophy and theology.