I tend to agree. It isn’t easy to generalise what entails a successful explanation, especially as one goes higher up the layers of abstraction (as you’ve put it) or further out to the more infeasibly testable realm.
What do you think is an elegant way to define the phenomenon of explanation that is more general than “hard-to-vary assertions about reality”?
I’m not sure there’s a neat form. Consider the explanation of why a mirror flips left and right but not up and down. Maxwell’s equations predict mirrors just fine, but it’s certainly not what people (well, most people) want from this explanation. Even if we try to be elegant we’ll probably have yo say complicated words like “the listener’s understanding”.
I tend to agree. It isn’t easy to generalise what entails a successful explanation, especially as one goes higher up the layers of abstraction (as you’ve put it) or further out to the more infeasibly testable realm.
What do you think is an elegant way to define the phenomenon of explanation that is more general than “hard-to-vary assertions about reality”?
I’m not sure there’s a neat form. Consider the explanation of why a mirror flips left and right but not up and down. Maxwell’s equations predict mirrors just fine, but it’s certainly not what people (well, most people) want from this explanation. Even if we try to be elegant we’ll probably have yo say complicated words like “the listener’s understanding”.