Concept tag
#explanation
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“Because that’s how it works”: when is that an explanation and when is it a refusal?
New cooks ask why a lot. Why rest the meat? Why salt the pasta water and not the sauce at the start? Why does this sauce split if you rush it? When I was an apprentice in Goa my chef answered almost…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Is ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ a real question or just a very good bit?
I do stand-up, mostly in northern clubs, and I've got a bit about "why is there something rather than nothing". The punchline is that the universe exists because somebody forgot to cancel the booking. It does all right. Afterwards a bloke in…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
What is the anthropic principle, and is it an explanation or a polite way of not explaining?
I drive a bus in Ankara and listen to lectures between stops. One lecture said that the physical constants of the universe seem "finely tuned" for life, and then mentioned "the anthropic principle", saying something like: of course we observe a universe…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Why does ‘the shape caused the door’ sound so wrong if Aristotle meant it?
When I was an apprentice my father explained Aristotle's four causes to me with a door: the cedar is what it is made of, the design is its form, I am the one who makes it, and it exists to be a…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani4 replies -
Splitting causation from explanation was a modern mistake, not an Aristotelian one
Reading Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists who described living things as self-producing systems in the early 1970s, I keep running into the same problem. To explain why a kelp forest is the way it is, I need to say what it's…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo6 replies -
“Why did this happen to me?” What do we owe someone who asks?
Last month my cousin, a woman in her forties who has never smoked, was diagnosed with lung cancer. When I sat with her afterwards she asked: “Why did this happen to me?” I gave her a good answer, I thought, from what…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Why did argument appear in Greece, India, China and Israel in the same few centuries?
When someone shows me a pattern I want a mechanism. Granting for the moment that something similar happened in several regions between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, with no documented transmission between them, the explanations I've seen are: Material surplus. Iron-age agriculture…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies