ABSTRACT
Whether scientific explanation is causal, unificatory, nomological, statistical, deductive, inductive, or any combination of them, a question may still remain about how and whether scientific explanations really answer our explanatory questions, really convey the sort of understanding that satisfies inquiry. One very long-standing perspective suggests that scientific explanation is limited, and in the end unsatisfying, because it does not go deep enough to the bottom of things. Sometimes this perspective expresses itself in the thesis that scientific explanations only reveal how things come about, but not why they happen. Thus for example, it will be held that all a D-N model tells us about an explanandum-event is that it happened because such an event always happens under certain conditions and these conditions obtained. When we want to know why something has happened, we already know that it has, and we may even know that events like it always happen under the conditions in which it happened. We want some deeper insight than how it came to happen.
