Comments on: The Natures of Explanation http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1832 ideas are the new oil Thu, 23 May 2013 10:23:23 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: @tomstafford http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1832&cpage=1#comment-19850 @tomstafford Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:20:01 +0000 http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1832#comment-19850 Peter
I think this is exactly the kind of situation I am talking about, and your example exactly falls victim to the non-exclusivity I identify.
Say you complete your analysis of 100 x social exclusion x failed levee maintance and claim 1800 deaths explained. Once you had done this, there would still be room for me to come and add more explanation. Why weren’t the levees maintained? It is possible – and this is something I know nothing about the reality of – it could be because of the other factor (social exclusion) in some round about way, or both could be explained themselves by a third factor (federal budgets?). Additional factors could in turn by linked to other explanations. Why were federal budgets cut? Why were the then necessary savings made in the levee budget? Was it to do with a new piece of city budgeting software? The ideological climate fueled by late 20th century talkshow hosts? Cognitive maladaptation to dealing with future risks etc etc and so on and so forth…

]]> By: Peter http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1832&cpage=1#comment-19749 Peter Wed, 06 Jun 2012 23:26:39 +0000 http://idiolect.org.uk/notes/?p=1832#comment-19749 1st, I’m glad to see you are finally willing to recognise non-Euclidian linearity and that therefore zero is greater than one.

2nd, non-exclusive explanations does not imply a non-zero-sum game. We might run out of things that need to be explained. Say we could know that only 100 people would have died from Katrina’s aftermath given perfect investment in levees, no social exclusion etc. Then we find that failed levee maintenance led to a ninefold increase in deaths, and then social exclusion to a doubling of deaths. Those two added explanations get us to the actual number of deaths (around 1800), and any further explanation for the deadliness of Katrina would have to revise down the explanatory power of the first two explanations.

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