ABSTRACT
The simple theme of this paper is that there is more than one type of explanation which is needed if human beings are to understand the universe in an adequate way. Broadly speaking, the natural sciences and the social sciences contain disciplines which practise two very different ways of explaining, neither of which can be reduced to the other, and which use different concepts and patterns of explanation. One way of stating the major difference between them is to say that one is primarily descriptive and the other is primarily normative. What I shall call ‘physical explanation’ is descriptive, in that it says what regular patterns there are in nature, in accordance with which objects in fact behave. What I shall call ‘personal explanation’, or more usually ‘value explanation’, is normative, in that it essentially contains a reference to what ought to happen, or at least to what some conscious beings think ought to happen. Moreover, it is very difficult if not impossible to exclude personal valuations from value explanations, that is, to avoid value judgements about the sorts of behaviour one is seeking to explain. Whereas in physical explanations, there is little need to appeal to one’s personal desires in recording what happens in a laboratory. It is for this reason that historical forms of explanation, for example, are usually imbued with implicit and explicit comments on the rationality or stupidity of the people one is writing about. But laws of physics or chemistry do not speak about the rationality or stupidity of electrons. The old distinction between fact and value, between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, is well expressed in a broad distinction between two very different types of explanation, the physical and the valuational.
