"Explanation" & A Reminder

As of 8:15AM this morning (Wed. 2/13) it appears that only five people have posted a comment in response to the activity, "Are you already a social theorist?". If you have not done this, try to do so by tomorrow. It is 3 easy activity points designed mainly to get you accustomed to commenting on the blog.

Below, as promised in class, are some thoughts from an unpublished manuscript of Prof. Erich Ahrens on the nature of explanation.

"We are sometimes inclined to fall into a very primitive idea of explanation. We think that a thing is explained by some force or power back of it. Wind is explained by a wind spirit, an instinctive act by instinct, or any thought or act is explained by some power in us or outside us which accounts for its existence. We should like to point out that there is nothing back of anything. That is not the function of explanation to tell us what causes space, time, life, thinking, acting, society, or even cause itself. The essence of explanation is to say what things are and to define them in and through their relations to other phenomena or forms of phenomena. We cannot be magicians in our explanations and pull things into being out of the void. Biologists explain one function of the body in relation to other functions. They relate the form of one animal body to that of other animal bodies, even to plants and inorganic compounds. But they do not ask for the cause of animal bodies, do not assume some entity back of that class of things which brought them into existence. Why, then, do we assume that there is something separate from and back of action? Thought, action, personality, life, society, etc., are categories as ultimate as space, time, and cause. They are the ground of explanation. It is in relation to these categories that life phenomena are made intelligible. Ignore them and you fall into the blue of empty abstractions and purely fictive explanations."

E.A. Ahrens
University of Illinois
Unpublished manuscript

Something to think about. The key passage being: "The essence of explanation is to say what things are and to define them in and through their relations to other phenomena or forms of phenomena."