"Despite" explanations

The phenomenon of contrastive explanations has been explored by a number of authors. There is another phenomenon in the vicinity, that of explanations of despite-claims, that has not received as much attention, even though it’s also interesting. Suppose Bob hates bananas and eats a banana.

1. Why did Bob eat a banana? – Because he was hungry.

2. Why did Bob eat a banana despite hating bananas? – Because he was very hungry.

A contrastive request for explanation, say

3. Why did Bob eat a banana rather than an apple?

doesn’t so much ask for an explanation of a special contrastive proposition, but rather constrains what kind of answer is acceptable—an answer that provides a contrastive answer. Thus, saying that Bob was hungry is not an acceptable answer since it fails to be contrastive between the banana and apple options, while saying that Bob was hungry and a banana was closer at hand is an acceptable answer. However, whenever one constrains what kind of an explanation is acceptable, one runs the risk that—even without any violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason—there is no answer. For instance, the question

4. Who killed the mayor and why?

is a request for explanation that has no answer if the mayor died from a tornado, because (4) constrains us to agentive explanation, and in this case there is no agentive explanation.

Are requests for explanations-despite like requests for contrastive or agentive explanations, requests that constrain the type of explanation that is acceptable, rather than simply modifying the proposition to be explained?

I am inclined to think that the answer is negative. Here is a preliminary analysis for what is going on when we ask:

5. Why p despite r?

First, the question carries a presupposition that the fact that r is antiexplanatory of p or that it has a tendency against p. If that presupposition is false, the question has no answer, being akin to one of the standard trick questions with false presuppositions (like “Have you stopped beating your spouse?”).

Second, what we are asking is something like this:

6. How was the antiexplanatory force of the fact that r against its being the case that p countered such that p is true?

And this seems to be a straightforward request for an explanation of an admittedly complex proposition, without any constraints being placed on what explanations are acceptable.

If I am right about this, then while a failure to have a good answer to contrastive explanation question does no damage to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), a failure to have a good answer to an explanation-despite question, when the presuppositions of the question are correct, would be a violation of the Principle. This suggests that some of the attention focused on contrastive explanation in connection with critique of the PSR should be redirected towards explanation-despite. I think the PSR can survive such attention, but the investigation is worthwhile.

Antiexplanation

If an explanation is a truth or hypothesis that removes or would remove mystery from the proposition to be explained, then an antiexplanation is a truth or hypothesis that adds or would add mystery to the proposition to be explained. Like in the case of explanations, we need to be sensitive to context with antiexplanations. That Alice dislikes bananas is, in typical contexts, antiexplanatory of why Alice ate the banana. But if we add to the background that it’s Lent and Alice wishes to do penance, then Alice’s dislike of bananas becomes explanatory.

It is widely held, though still moderately controversial, that:

1. The fact that a hypothesis p is explanatory of some known truth is evidence for p.

A parallel claim about antiexplanations would:

2. The fact that a hypothesis p is antiexplanatory of some known truth is evidence against p.

This sounds even more plausible than (1). In a typical context, the antiexplanatoriness of a dislike of bananas to actual consumption of a banana provides evidence that Alice who ate a banana does not dislike bananas. Similarly, the fact that Bob is in perfect health is antiexplanatory of Bob’s death, and hence if Bob has died, we have evidence that Bob’s health was imperfect.

There are lots of explanatory arguments in philosophy based on (1). But it would be worth exploring whether one can’t also give antiexplanatory arguments based on (2).

In fact, I think some fairly intuitive arguments can be rephrased as antiexplanatory arguments. For instance:

3. Materialism is antiexplanatory of consciousness.

4. Consciousness is a known fact.

5. So, we have evidence against materialism.

The thought behind (3) is simply that there is intuitively something particularly mysterious about a purely material thing having a conscious point of view.

C. S. Lewis’s version of the moral argument for theism can be taken to be in part an antiexplanatory argument.

6. Atheism is antiexplanatory of moral law.

7. Moral law is a known fact.

8. So, we have evidence against atheism.

Further evaluation of such arguments would call for a deeper philosophical analysis of antiexplanation and an examination of (2). This is a task worth doing. Someone should do it.