+1 on the sprawling mess. What I have personally found useful is figuring out what is going on in terms of mental heuristics when some causal explanations seem ‘better’ than others. Which involves type errors and degrees of freedom.
Type error: consider Aristotle’s 4 causes. If I ask you a why question about one kind of cause and you give me an explanation about another kind of cause there has been a type error.
Degrees of freedom: if there are more degrees of freedom in your explanation than in the thing you are attempting to explain then you can always get the answer you want. Consider astrology. A good explanation has fewer degrees of freedom than the thing it is explaining and thus creates compression and prediction power, i.e. it eliminates more possible worlds whereas bad explanations leave you with the same number of possible worlds as you started with.
+1 on the sprawling mess. What I have personally found useful is figuring out what is going on in terms of mental heuristics when some causal explanations seem ‘better’ than others. Which involves type errors and degrees of freedom.
Can you please elaborate on type errors and degrees of freedom in terms of mental heuristics? I am not sure if I followed
Type error: consider Aristotle’s 4 causes. If I ask you a why question about one kind of cause and you give me an explanation about another kind of cause there has been a type error.
Degrees of freedom: if there are more degrees of freedom in your explanation than in the thing you are attempting to explain then you can always get the answer you want. Consider astrology. A good explanation has fewer degrees of freedom than the thing it is explaining and thus creates compression and prediction power, i.e. it eliminates more possible worlds whereas bad explanations leave you with the same number of possible worlds as you started with.
“At Milliways, you can go as many times as you like without meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment that would cause”.