ABSTRACT
The etymological root of explaining is explanare, to make plain. This root suggests two powerful metaphors: ‘to strip bare’ and ‘to reveal’. These metaphors hint at different purposes of explaining. The first has connotations of getting down to the essentials. The second leans toward revelation, to revealing subtleties, intricacies, and perhaps the uniqueness of an object, action, event, or occurrence. The first metaphor resonates with scientific approaches, such as the development of attribution theory, which seeks to identify the dimensions, through statistical analysis, on which people provide explanations of their behaviour (Hewstone, 1989). The second metaphor resonates with work in discourse analysis and hermeneutics (Antaki, 1994; Potter & Wetherall, 1994), which seeks to tease out the patterns and meanings of speech in a specific context such as a courtroom or classroom.
