Explanation

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

But in any case, understanding is one of the higher functions of the human mind and brain, and a unique one. Many other physical systems, such as animals’ brains, computers and other machines, can assimilate facts and act upon them. But at present we know of nothing that is capable of understanding an explanation – or of wanting one in the first place – other than a human mind. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

To choose an option, rationally, is to choose the associated explanation. Therefore, rational decision-making consists not of weighing evidence but of explaining it, in the course of explaining the world. One judges arguments as explanations, not justifications, and one does this creatively, using conjecture, tempered by every kind of criticism. It is in the nature of good explanations – being hard to vary – that there is only one of them. Having created it, one is no longer tempted by the alternatives. They have been not outweighed, but out-argued, refuted and abandoned. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

During the course of a creative process, one is not struggling to distinguish between countless different explanations of nearly equal merit; typically, one is struggling to create even one good explanation, and, having succeeded, one is glad to be rid of the rest. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it. Turing invented his test in the hope of bypassing all those philosophical problems. In other words, he hoped that the functionality could be achieved before it was explained. Unfortunately it is very rare for practical solutions to fundamental problems to be discovered without any explanation of why they work. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Using our explanations, we ‘see’ right through the behaviour to the meaning. Parrots copy distinctive sounds; apes copy purposeful movements of a certain limited class. But humans do not especially copy any behaviour. They use conjecture, criticism and experiment to create good explanations of the meaning of things – other people’s behaviour, their own, and that of the world in general. That — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

[Jared Diamond's] mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs [in his book Guns, Germs and Steel] not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The Enlightenment [was the start of] a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The whole motivation for seeking a perfectly secure foundation for mathematics was mistaken. It was a form of justificationism. Mathematics is characterized by its use of proofs in the same way that science is characterized by its use of experimental testing; in neither case is that the object of the exercise. The object of mathematics is to understand – to explain – abstract entities. Proof is primarily a means of ruling out false explanations; and sometimes it also provides mathematical truths that need to be explained. But, like all fields in which progress is possible, mathematics seeks not random truths but good explanations. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Its quest for good explanations corrects the errors, allows for the biases and misleading perspectives, and fills in the gaps. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

So we seek explanations that remain robust when we test them against those flickers and shadows, and against each other, and against criteria of logic and reasonableness and everything else we can think of. And when we can change them no more, we have understood some objective truth. And, as if that were not enough, what we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real. We are like gods! — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The theory reaches out, as it were, from its finite origins inside one brain that has been affected only by scraps of patchy evidence from a small part of one hemisphere of one planet – to infinity. This reach of explanations is another meaning of ‘the beginning of infinity’. It is the ability of some of them to solve problems beyond those that they were created to solve. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Shoddy explanations that yield correct predictions are two a penny, as UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy-theorists and pseudo-scientists of every variety should (but never do) bear in mind. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

inventing falsehoods is easy, and therefore they are easy to vary once found; discovering good explanations is hard, but the harder they are to find, the harder they are to vary once found. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

There is an explanatory link between ought and is, and this provides one of the ways in which reason can indeed address moral issues. — David Deutsch, N/A

Therefore, if the ancient Greeks had known that a warm growing season occurs in Australia at the very moment when, as they believed, Demeter is at her saddest, they could have inferred that there was something wrong with their explanation of seasons. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The fact that everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. ‘Problems are soluble.’ – The ‘perspiration’ phase can always be automated. – The knowledge-friendliness of the physical world. – People are universal constructors. – The beginning of the open-ended creation of explanations. – The environments that could create an open-ended stream of knowledge, if suitably primed – i.e. almost all environments. – The fact that new explanations create new problems. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The sea [of] change in the values and patterns of thinking of a whole community of thinkers, which brought about a sustained and accelerating creation of knowledge, happened only once in history, with the Enlightenment and its scientific revolution. An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

It is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The quest for good explanations is, I believe, the basic regulating principle not only of science, but of the Enlightenment generally. It is the feature that distinguishes those approaches to knowledge from all others, and it implies all those other conditions for scientific progress I have discussed: It trivially implies that prediction alone is insufficient. Somewhat less trivially, it leads to the rejection of authority, because if we adopt a theory on authority, that means that we would also have accepted a range of different theories on authority. And hence it also implies the need for a tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

What if you’d rather not know? You may not like these predictions. Your friends and colleagues may ridicule them. You may try to modify the explanation so that it will not make them, without spoiling its agreement with observations and with other ideas for which you have no good alternatives. You will fail. That is what a good explanation will do for you: it makes it harder for you to fool yourself. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably cause disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

We do so by seeking good explanations – explanations that are hard to vary in the sense that changing the details would ruin the explanation. This, not experimental testing, was the decisive factor in the scientific revolution, and also in the unique, rapid, sustained progress in other fields that have participated in the Enlightenment. That was a rebellion against authority which, unlike most such rebellions, tried not to seek authoritative justifications for theories, but instead set up a tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Thus we acquire ever more knowledge of reality by solving problems and finding better explanations. But when all is said and done, problems and explanations are located within the human mind, which owes its reasoning power to a fallible brain, and its supply of information to fallible senses. What, then, entitles a human mind to draw conclusions about objective, external reality from its own purely subjective experience and reason? — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications

Observations are theory-laden. Given an experimental oddity, we have no way of predicting whether it will eventually be explained merely by correcting a minor parochial assumption or by revolutionizing entire sciences. We can know that only after we have seen it in the light of a new explanation. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

They can be understood only by being explained. Fortunately, our best theories embody deep explanations as well as accurate predictions. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Prediction – even perfect, universal prediction – is simply no substitute for explanation. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for. The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. Mini-enlightenment A short-lived tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Rational: Attempting to solve problems by seeking good explanations; actively pursuing error-correction by creating criticisms of both existing ideas and new proposals. The West The political, moral, economic and intellectual culture that has been growing around the Enlightenment values of science, reason and freedom. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The real source of our theories is conjecture, and the real source of our knowledge is conjecture alternating with criticism. We create theories by rearranging, combining, altering and adding to existing ideas with the intention of improving upon them. The role of experiment and observation is to choose between existing theories, not to be the source of new ones. We interpret experiences through explanatory theories, but true explanations are not obvious. Fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Fundamental or significant phenomenon: One that plays a necessary role in the explanation of many phenomena, or whose distinctive features require distinctive explanation in terms of fundamental theories. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Parochialism: Mistaking appearance for reality, or local regularities for universal laws. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Person: An entity that can create explanatory knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients like space, time and subatomic particles, but also of life, thought, computation and the other things to which those explanations refer. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Quantum theory is, as I have said, one such theory. But the other three main strands of explanation through which we seek to understand the fabric of reality are all ‘high level’ from the point of view of quantum physics. They are the theory of evolution (primarily the evolution of living organisms), epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and the theory of computation (about computers and what they can and cannot, in principle, compute). — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Bad philosophy [is] philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Interpretation [is] the explanatory part of a scientific theory, supposedly distinct from its predictive or instrumental part. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Positivism [is] the bad philosophy that everything not ‘derived from observation’ should be eliminated from science. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Logical positivism [is] the bad philosophy that statements not verifiable by observation are meaningless. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The criterion and the existing explanation are conflicting ideas. I shall call a situation in which we experience conflicting ideas a problem. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

But developments such as abstract language, explanation, wealth above the level of subsistence, and long-range trade all had the potential to erode parochialism and hence to give causal power to ideas. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

It would be much truer to say that the landscape we live in is the product of ideas. The primeval landscape, though packed with evidence and therefore opportunity, contained not a single idea. It is knowledge alone that converts landscapes into resources, and humans alone who are the authors of explanatory knowledge and hence of the uniquely human behaviour called ‘history’. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification—the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit. — Karl Popper, 1992