A Communication-First Account of Explanation

TL;DR

This work addresses how explanatory virtue can be understood when explanations are treated as communicative acts rather than purely ontological relations. It advances a communication-first account by embedding interventionist causality within a rational speech acts framework, yielding a formal model with a literal listener, a pragmatic speaker, and a pragmatic listener who reason about how explanations influence downstream decisions. The approach derives explanatory virtues—such as usefulness to downstream aims, alignment with background knowledge, invariance across conditions, nonredundancy, and appropriate levels of abstraction—from conversational dynamics and manipulation-oriented reasoning. It demonstrates that many features of robust explanations can emerge naturally from how speakers anticipate and how listeners utilize information in real-time interaction, offering a bridge between philosophical theories of explanation and cognitive-scientific findings on explanation and communication. The framework holds promise for application beyond philosophy, including scientific practice and cognitive science, by modeling how communities and agents use explanations to manipulate and control outcomes.

Abstract

This paper develops a formal account of causal explanation, grounded in a theory of conversational pragmatics, and inspired by the interventionist idea that explanation is about asking and answering what-if-things-had-been-different questions. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the account, relative to previous accounts, by showing that widely recognised explanatory virtues emerge naturally, as do subtle empirical patterns concerning the impact of norms on causal judgments. This shows the value of a communication-first approach to explanation: getting clear on explanation's communicative dimension is an important prerequisite for philosophical work on explanation. The result is a simple but powerful framework for incorporating insights from the cognitive sciences into philosophical work on explanation, which will be useful for philosophers or cognitive scientists interested in explanation.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Causal Model $\mathcal{M}_{(A\land B)\lor C}$
• Figure 2: Bob's epistemic state $\mathcal{K}$ in Example \ref{['example: holiday tan']}. Red nodes indicate that the variable is false (has value $0$), and green true. The explanandum (known to have value $1$) is in yellow.
• Figure 3: Bob's epistemic state $\mathcal{K}$ in Example \ref{['example: roof replacement']}.
• Figure 4: Bob's epistemic state in \ref{['example: roommate theft']}
• Figure 5: Bob's epistemic state $\mathcal{K}$ in Example \ref{['example: late meeting']}.

Theorems & Definitions (10)

• Example 1: Holiday Tan
• Definition 1: Structural Causal Model
• Example 2: $\mathcal{M}_{(A\land B)\lor C}$ Causal Model
• Definition 2: HP Analysis of Explanation
• Example 3: Roof Replacement
• Example 4: Milk Theft
• Example 5: Late Meeting
• Definition 3: Manipulation Game
• Example 6: Event of the Year
• Example 7