Explanations Have A Life Of Their Own

We can create them. But we can’t control them.

The role of explanations in knowledge creation and progress is one of the connecting threads in David Deutsch’s masterpiece The Beginning of Infinity.

In Chapter 1, The Reach of Explanations, David introduces the concept of “good explanations,” explanations that are hard to vary and survive criticism.

This property, being hard to vary, makes good explanations independent of their creator. It has important consequences for the predictions these explanations make and for how we should approach them.

As David writes:

Suppose for the sake of argument that you thought of the axis-tilt theory [being responsible for seasonality] yourself. It is your conjecture, your own original creation. Yet because it is a good explanation – hard to vary – it is not yours to modify. It has an autonomous meaning and an autonomous domain of applicability. You cannot confine its predictions to a region of your choosing. Whether you like it or not, it makes predictions about places both known to you and unknown to you, predictions that you have thought of and ones that you have not thought of. Tilted planets in similar orbits in other solar systems must have seasonal heating and cooling – planets in the most distant galaxies, and planets that we shall never see because they were destroyed aeons ago, and also planets that have yet to form. 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.

There is something profound about the autonomy and reach of good explanations. With just the power of our minds, we can create an entity that makes predictions independent of our opinions and wishes. Some of those predictions may even reach far beyond the domain that originated them.

But we don’t need to strive for infinite reach when creating a good explanation. We can generate good explanations to solve everyday problems in the parochial domains of life and work. All we need is creativity, criticism, and patience.

Whether deep or shallow, good explanations have a life of their own. We might give birth to them, but, like true children, we can’t control where they’ll go. All we can do is take our intellectual progeny seriously, follow the predictions where they lead, and — as always — be on the lookout for errors.