ABSTRACT
What is distinctive about a theory in this latter sense is that it goes beyond the explanations of particular phenomena to explain these explanations. When particular phenomena are explained by an empirical generalization, a theory will go on to explain why the generalization obtains, and to explain the exceptions to the generalizations-the conditions under which it fails to obtain. When a number of generalizations are uncovered about the phenomena in a domain of enquiry, a theory may emerge which enables us to understand the diversity of generalizations as all reflecting the operation of a single or small number of processes. Theories, in short, unify, and they do so almost always by going beyond, beneath and behind the phenomena that empirical regularities report to identify underlying processes that account for the phenomena we observe. This is probably the source of the notion that what makes an explanation scientific is the unifications it effects. For theories are our most powerful explainers, and they operate by bringing diverse phenomena under a small number of fundamental assumptions.
