Philosophy of Science
Why 'Because Science' Is Not Actually an Answer
Science tells us how things happen, but the question of why anything counts as an explanation at all turns out to be one of the most unsettled problems in all of philosophy.
The Idea
When a doctor tells you that aspirin relieves headaches because it inhibits prostaglandin synthesis, you feel like you understand something. But a philosopher of science would gently ask: what is it that you actually now possess? You have a causal story, yes — a chain of molecular events. But is a causal chain the same thing as an explanation? And why should tracing causes feel like understanding at all? This is the puzzle at the heart of scientific explanation. The dominant view for most of the 20th century was the Deductive-Nomological model, developed by Carl Hempel in the 1940s. On his account, to explain an event is to show that it was logically inevitable given certain laws of nature and initial conditions. Explanation, in other words, is just successful prediction run backwards. The aspirin works because, given the laws of biochemistry and the presence of the drug, it could not have done otherwise. But this tidy picture cracked quickly. It implied that you could explain why a flagpole casts a shadow of a certain length by citing the height of the flagpole and the angle of the sun — which feels right. But it equally implied you could 'explain' the height of the flagpole by citing the length of its shadow. The logic runs both ways, yet only one direction feels genuinely explanatory. Something deeper than deduction is doing the work. The question of what that something is has kept philosophers busy ever since.
In the World
In 1965, Hempel himself posed what became known as the problem of the flagpole — and it quietly destabilised his own life's work. But the stakes became much more visible in a real scientific controversy: the debate over whether evolutionary theory truly explains biological traits, or merely redescribes them. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin's famous 1979 paper, 'The Spandrels of San Marco', accused a strand of evolutionary thinking of a subtle explanatory failure. The target was the habit of taking any biological feature — the chin, the whites of human eyes, the precise curvature of a finch's beak — and constructing a 'just-so story' about why natural selection favoured it. These stories were internally consistent and unfalsifiable, which meant they technically fit Hempel's model of explanation perfectly. They cited laws (natural selection) and initial conditions (ancestral environments) and derived the outcome. But Gould and Lewontin argued that this was not explanation — it was narrative dressed up as science. A real explanation requires showing not just that an outcome could be derived from general principles, but that you have identified the actual mechanism, the real causal history, and crucially, that you have ruled out alternatives. The aspirin case and the flagpole case share a deeper lesson: the form of an explanation and its genuine explanatory power are not the same thing. Science can produce statements that look exactly like explanations while explaining almost nothing.
Why It Matters
This isn't just a technical debate for philosophers in seminar rooms. It shapes how we evaluate claims in everyday life — from medical advice to economic forecasting to self-help psychology. When someone says 'studies show' or 'the data suggests', they are invoking the authority of scientific explanation. But knowing what makes an explanation genuinely good — not just formally valid, but causally precise, mechanism-identifying, and alternative-ruling-out — gives you a much sharper tool for evaluating those claims. It lets you ask not just 'is this true?' but 'does this actually explain anything?' There is also something more personal here. We reach for explanations constantly — for our own behaviour, our moods, our choices. The same standards apply. A story about why you behave a certain way that is unfalsifiable, that rules out no alternatives, that names no mechanism — that is a narrative, not an understanding. The philosophy of scientific explanation is, at its root, a meditation on the difference between knowing and merely having a story. That distinction is worth carrying into the rest of your week.
A Question to Ponder
Think of something you believe you understand — about your own behaviour, a relationship, or the world — and ask yourself: is this an explanation, or is it a story that simply couldn't be false?
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