ABSTRACT
Natural science furnishes us with explanation, the human sciences with understanding. This dictum roughly captures the traditional dualist conception of the relation between the science of nature and that of human beings. Recent years have seen the development of a quite different conception of explanations, according to which they are rooted in the rhetorical practice of putting questions and giving answers. Explanations are answers to questions that an individual puts because she lacks information about a specific situation or a specific phenomenon, and the answer is intended to supply her with the information she needs. Functionalist explanations are another type of explanations and quite different from causal explanations in the sense that they explain a phenomenon by pointing to what it causes instead of pointing to what causes it has. Interpretation so understood invokes the literal meaning of the work in stating what is true, say, of the work's narrative intentions.
