For an adult, saying “that was a crow, and crows sometimes caw” seems like a fairly complete answer because we already possess a lot of contextual information about animals and why they make noises.
Ok, but what is the form that contextual information takes? I’m skeptical that most adults actually have a well-formed set of beliefs about the causes or biophysics of animal behavior. I think my mind includes a function that tells me what sorts of things are acceptable hypotheses about animal behavior and I have on hand a few particular facts about why particular animals do particular things. But I don’t think anyone can actually proceed along the different levels of abstraction I outlined. I’m worried that what actually makes us think “there is a crow and crows caw” is that it just connects the observation to something we’re familiar with. We’re used to animals and the things that they do and probably have a few norms that guide our expectations with animals. But at rarely if ever are we reducing or explaining things in terms of concepts we already already fully understand. Rather, we we just render familiar the unfamiliar. Think of explanations as translations, for example. If I say “a plude is what a voom does” no one will have any idea what I mean. But if I tell you that a plude is a mind and a voom is a brain suddenly people will think they understand what I mean even if they don’t actually know what a mind is or anything about a brain.
A lot of the lower-level ‘explanation’ you described above was really about how the crow cawed (lungs, vibrations, etc.) With this information, you could build a mechanical crow that did in fact crow—but the mechanism for how the mechanical crow caws would have nothing to do with why the organic crow caws.
I wonder if a taxonomy of explanations would be worth while. We have physical reduction, token history explanation (how that crow got outside my window and what lead it to caw at that moment), type historical explanation (the evolutionary explanation for why crows caw)… I’m sure we can come up with more. Note though that any historical explanation is going to be incomplete in the way explain above because it will appeal to concepts and entities that need to be reduced. Anyway, the “explanation” in my above comment was never for “why do crows caw” but why do I hear cawing. And I posited that there was a crow and that crows caw. These assumptions are sufficient to predict the possibility of cawing. But even though they are predictively sufficient they don’t actually explain what happened. It is also true that the assumptions themselves are unexplained (as you say, we need biology to tell us why crows caw) but even if we knew all this we still wouldn’t have explained the cawing.
This example has the unfortunate quality of being true. But say we posit that astrological configurations control the movement of cows. Obviously this isn’t true, but pretend that it is. Pretend the movement of the planets could predict, with 100% confidence, where and how cows moved in a given field. Say I prove this to everyone tomorrow. Would anyone here be satisfied with “Planets control cows” as a fundamental law of nature? Would this explain anything? I take it a lot of people would set about trying to figure out how and why the planets affect cows and we’d look at magnetic and gravitational fields and find which bovine organs were most sensitive to such fields etc. But these explanations would be similarly unsatisfying and we would look deeper.
The problem is every individual explanation is just like the “Planets control cows” explanation. So we have to explain what is special about fundamental laws or why this doesn’t matter.
Ok, but what is the form that contextual information takes? I’m skeptical that most adults actually have a well-formed set of beliefs about the causes or biophysics of animal behavior. I think my mind includes a function that tells me what sorts of things are acceptable hypotheses about animal behavior and I have on hand a few particular facts about why particular animals do particular things. But I don’t think anyone can actually proceed along the different levels of abstraction I outlined. I’m worried that what actually makes us think “there is a crow and crows caw” is that it just connects the observation to something we’re familiar with. We’re used to animals and the things that they do and probably have a few norms that guide our expectations with animals. But at rarely if ever are we reducing or explaining things in terms of concepts we already already fully understand. Rather, we we just render familiar the unfamiliar. Think of explanations as translations, for example. If I say “a plude is what a voom does” no one will have any idea what I mean. But if I tell you that a plude is a mind and a voom is a brain suddenly people will think they understand what I mean even if they don’t actually know what a mind is or anything about a brain.
I wonder if a taxonomy of explanations would be worth while. We have physical reduction, token history explanation (how that crow got outside my window and what lead it to caw at that moment), type historical explanation (the evolutionary explanation for why crows caw)… I’m sure we can come up with more. Note though that any historical explanation is going to be incomplete in the way explain above because it will appeal to concepts and entities that need to be reduced. Anyway, the “explanation” in my above comment was never for “why do crows caw” but why do I hear cawing. And I posited that there was a crow and that crows caw. These assumptions are sufficient to predict the possibility of cawing. But even though they are predictively sufficient they don’t actually explain what happened. It is also true that the assumptions themselves are unexplained (as you say, we need biology to tell us why crows caw) but even if we knew all this we still wouldn’t have explained the cawing.
This example has the unfortunate quality of being true. But say we posit that astrological configurations control the movement of cows. Obviously this isn’t true, but pretend that it is. Pretend the movement of the planets could predict, with 100% confidence, where and how cows moved in a given field. Say I prove this to everyone tomorrow. Would anyone here be satisfied with “Planets control cows” as a fundamental law of nature? Would this explain anything? I take it a lot of people would set about trying to figure out how and why the planets affect cows and we’d look at magnetic and gravitational fields and find which bovine organs were most sensitive to such fields etc. But these explanations would be similarly unsatisfying and we would look deeper.
The problem is every individual explanation is just like the “Planets control cows” explanation. So we have to explain what is special about fundamental laws or why this doesn’t matter.