What is an explanation? And more to the point, what is a good explanation? To answer these questions we have to formulate a "good" explanation of "explanation" along with an explanation of what constitutes "good" in this context. There is a whole branch of the philosophy of science concerned with characterising scientific explanation and noting how it differs from ordinary, everyday explanations. We can draw on this to outline such an explanation. In a classic article, Jan Faye (2007) outlines three modes of scientific explanation. These will form the basis for an exploration of what kinds of explanations that Buddhism offers.
Formal-Logical Mode of Explanation
In this approach A and B are both (logical) propositions. We may say that A explains B if B can be inferred from A using deduction. This approach involves some idealisation because both A and B are propositions rather than brute facts. Moreover, if A explains B according to this definition, then A is ipso facto a good explanation. Here a "good explanation" is one that follows the rules of logic. Formal-logical explanations are thus prescriptive rather than descriptive.
The problem with this mode of explanation is that in applying deduction we inevitably seem to reproduce our starting assumptions. All exercises in logic involve axioms or propositions that we hold to be true but cannot substantiate. For example, many Buddhists assume that the Buddha was an historical character. We can't prove this, since there is no direct evidence of the Buddha, but the proposition has very broad appeal and most people uncritically accept it as true. The problem, then, is how this unevidenced commitment affects the outcome of deductions.
If we were simply to begin with known facts then we might deduce new facts. But in all cases of applying logic to the real world we cannot avoid axioms, or at least propositions that we take to be axiomatically valid. If we set out to prove that the Buddha was an historical character when we have a prior intellectual commitment to that proposition, i.e. if we treat the Buddha's historicity as axiomatic, then the details of the logical argument are irrelevant. There will always come a point when we deduce that the Buddha was an historical character and we will judge this to be a valid deduction precisely because it concurs with our presupposition. In other words, if our axiom is "the Buddha was an historical character" then any sequence of deductions that reproduces the axiom will automatically be accepted as valid.
As we have seen recently (see Drewes 2022), the axiom of the historical Buddha has been challenged. Drewes argues that the basic definition of an historical character is that they can be connected to an historical event or fact. Since the Buddha cannot be so connected, it does not make sense (at least for academic historians) to speak of an "historical Buddha". Indeed, the same can be said of all the characters in early Buddhist texts, including the kings. Usually if anyone can be associated with history, it is kings. King Piyadasi (aka Asoka "He who is without remorse") is the first historical character in Indian history. He left artefacts that we can definitely link to him.
This mode of explanation has long been out of fashion in science, but as we can see, it still holds sway in theology including Buddhist theology.
Ontological Mode of Explanation
Ontological explanations seek to identify and understand causes. The idea here is that facts, events, and states explain observations by revealing law-like casual relations between them. This mode of explanation is familiar to anyone who has studied science. In this mode, A explains B if A is the cause of B: where A and B are facts, events, or states.
In a classical scientific explanation we might say, for example, that a force applied to a mass causes it to accelerate (i.e. undergo a change in speed and/or direction). The size of this effect is given by Newton's second law of motion: F = ma. From this we can say that the magnitude of the change in acceleration is equal to the force applied divided by the mass. It also allows us to define a unit of force: one Newton of force is 1 kg⋅m/s2. However, note that there is no term in the equation that corresponds to "causation".
As Faye says, in this mode, "An explanation is both true and relevant if, and only if, it discloses the causal structure behind the given phenomena." (I'm referring to an unpaginated preprint). As another commentator, Sam Wilkinson puts it, "events explain other events, and they do so by standing in predictable law-like relations" (2014: 2)
Causation is a very tricky subject since, as David Hume observed some 300 years ago, we never observe causation, we only ever observe sequences of events. Immanuel Kant went further with this and asserted that causation and other metaphysical notions, like space and time, are actually structures imposed on experience by our minds in order to make sense of them. This basic insight seems to have stood the test of time. The explanations of causation I have seen tend to be rather abstract. In my view, our understanding of causation is related to learning how to use our own limbs and especially our hands. The archetype of causation, then, is action initiated by desire. This is why the concept of causation seems so intuitive but also why it is so confusing. Desire is an emotion and is not present outside of animal life. It's not present at all in most sequences of events in the universe, and as far as we know the only agents in the entire universe all live on earth. Thus our internal model for causation is not typical of causation generally. The conscious initiation of an action is an anomaly, not a model.
Moreover, most events have multiple causes and we tend to highlight one or a small number from amongst them. The real world is far too complex for single causes to give rise to single effects, but most causal explanations tend to be simplistic. Our perception of initiating movements is biased because we are simply not aware of the complexity involved in making our limbs move: our kinesthetic sense, for example, is very coarse grained compared to our physiology. We don't sense, in any way, the nerve impulses involved, or the muscle fibres contracting and relaxing. We just have a broad sense of the limb moving.
Thus, causal explanations are also fraught with uncertainty because the basic concept of causation is ill-defined and our understanding of it is based on a local anomaly.
This leaves us with the third mode of scientific explanation.
The Pragmatic Mode of Explanation
"Pragmatic" here is a technical term that refers to a particular approach to philosophy that is mainly focussed on speech and speech acts. A speech act is an utterance that is intended to do something. This approach is contrasted with semantics, which is focussed on what words mean. It is not that pragmatists deny the meaning of words, but they do see meaning' as secondary to 'doing'.
A question, in this view, is a speech act with the intention of seeking information. And in this mode of explanation, an explanation begins with a question. A pragmatic explanation, then, is a response to a question. As such, then, the purpose of an explanation is to satisfy the questioner. And an explanation is "good" to the extent that it does this.
This may seem like a slippery slope to "relativism". Philosophical pragmatism addresses this by requiring that the questioner not be delusional and thus the answer only has to satisfy the rational requirements of a questioner and not their irrational requirements. Different philosophers have addressed this in different ways. For some, it requires a metaphysical turn, that is, linking "good" to being "true".
Less problematic is the idea of accuracy: the closeness of an observed value to the true value. A good explanation has to attain a somewhat arbitrary level of accuracy. In physics, for example, scientists look for a confidence level of 5-sigma (5 σ). This means that there is a one in two million chance that your measurement is a statistical fluke that can be explained by measurement error. Note that all measurements have an inherent level of error due to the limitations of our methods. Real science will always state what level of error the scientists have identified in their measurements. If you see a measurement that is not followed by the ± sign, then you should be on alert because someone is trying to deceive you.
An explanation that matches observations with this level of accuracy is taken to be a good explanation in science. Other philosophers try to apply criteria like "usefulness".
In the end, however, the person asking the question has to understand the explanation, and that explanation has to address the rational concerns that prompted the question. And if it does this, then it is a good explanation.
Incidentally, this is consistent with Mercier & Sperbers contention that reasons are post hoc explanations that we produce in response to questions about motivations. Humans don't act for reasons, we act and then produce reasons as required. Our deliberations on whether to act or how to act are generally handled by inferential processes below the threshold of awareness. Moreover, we tend to adopt the first plausible explanation for our actions that comes to mind. A striking demonstration of this can be seen in people with neurological damage who cannot form new memories. Oliver Sacks reports one such case in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). The patient is in hospital but cannot remember why. Asked to account for why he is there, the man confabulates a story that seems plausible to himself. He's there for a check up, he's waiting for someone, and so on. Each time it's different because he can't remember his previous answers. One of the functions of memory is to put limits on our speculations about how we got here.
By this criterion, if a five-year old asks me why the sky is blue, and I respond by explaining how the scattering of incident sun light by atoms is dependent on the wavelength of the light, and blue light is scattered more than other frequencies and so on, the answer is objectively true and accurate to some arbitrary level. However, I have still failed to give a good answer because my interlocutor is unlikely to understand it. This is not relativism, since we can still say that some answers are better than others. The sky is not blue because that is God's favourite colour, for example. Rather there is a limit on the "goodness" of an explanation that is dependent on the knowledge and capabilities of the questioner. Similarly, if a scientist asks why the sky is blue and I give a mythological answer that would satisfy the people of, say, Iron Age India, it would not be a good explanation.
So a good explanation, in this mode, is an utterance that addresses a particular question, asked by a particular person whose rational needs (especially for understanding) must be satisfied by the answer. This means that explanations are not universal, they have to fit the requirements of the question/questioner. In this mode, contrary to the others, the explanation is not inherent in nature, not a fixed thing, but changes dependent on who is asking and why. An explanation has to do more than simply reveal a pre-existing truth, it has to communicate something to a specific audience. And as such, an unmitigated scientific explanation is seldom the best explanation except to other scientists.
Other Modes?
These modes are how philosophers of science explain explanation to each other. I was alerted to this by reading Sam Wilkinson's (2014) application of Faye's schema to a problem in neuroscience. One mode that is not included, though it was the primary mode of explanation for ancient Buddhists is: explanation by analogy. In this mode one can explain an unknown event or process by analogy to some known process. One of the best examples of this from ancient Buddhism is the niyāma doctrine that we find in Pāli commentaries.
In this view, for example, we can explain karma by reference to the way a seed grows into a plant (bīja-niyāma). Indeed, we refer to the results of karma as phala "fruit" and vipāka "ripening, maturing" (from √pac"to cook"). This gives us the like-for-like specificity of karma: good actions (kusala, puṇya) lead to a good rebirth (sugati); bad actions (pāpa, akusala, apuṇya) lead to a bad rebirth (duggati). The analogy here is that a rice seed can only give rise to a rice plant. On the other hand, karma also has to be timely, i.e. to ripen at the appropriate time. The analogy for this is the way that plants bloom and fruit in season, or the way the monsoon rains (mostly) come at the same time each year (utu-niyāma).
However, sometimes ancient Buddhists could find no analogy. And in these cases they often resorted to theological arguments. Taking another example from the doctrine of pañcavidha niyāma, Kamma-niyāma itself refers to the inevitability of consequences. Karma must ripen. There is no good analogy for the inevitability of this, since it is not true that real fruit must ripen. In nature, crops may fail to ripen for many reasons. Some unripe fruit fall from the tree, some are consumed by birds, some are affected by draught, etc. Where they could find no analogy from nature, Buddhists would resort to an appeal to authority. In the case of kamma-niyāma Buddhaghosa opted to cite a verse from the Dhammapada (127) which describes inevitability.
Notably, the belief in the inevitability of karma is overridden in Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna texts that allow for religious practices to mitigate karmic consequences. The epitome of this is the Vajrasatva mantra which is said to eliminate even the most negative forms of karma, such as that from killing a buddha. This alone suggests that argument from authority is less successful than argument from analogy.
Doctrine as Explanation
Buddhist explanations are typically codified as "doctrine", a word that simply means "teaching", but is used to refer to the official body of teachings that are core to a particular religious community. Some religieux, notably Christians and Muslims, define membership of their group by acceptance of certain doctrines. Modern Buddhists will often ape this practice, setting out a Buddhist catechism, but ancient Buddhists seem to have defined membership in terms of behaviour rather than belief. And after all, a person can profess belief, but if their behaviour is not consistent with that belief such profession is meaningless.
In my (pragmatic) view doctrines are not arbitrary, but reflect a considered position on a particular question or problem. That is to say, a doctrine can (and often does) function as an explanation. For example, in response to the question, "How should we live?", Buddhists codified sets of training rules or śikṣapāda, the best known of which are the pratimokṣa and the five precepts for lay Buddhists.
However, Buddhists seldom codified the questions or problems that gave rise to the doctrines. And thus we have to be careful. We do not know, for example, why anyone believed in rebirth in India. Vedic speakers are from a milieu that did not believe in rebirth, but embraced it when they encountered it in India. We know a good deal about the content of what various communities believed, and we know how they responded to the belief, but we don't know why they found rebirth a compelling idea. Nor do we fully understand how rebirth happened, since even with Buddhism there was no general agreement on this.
There are times when we can attempt to reverse engineer the problem that gave rise to a doctrine, but since we have no way to go back in time and confirm this directly, such reconstructions are always speculative.
The most fundamental thing that Buddhism seeks to explain is suffering. In Christianity this must be explained with reference to the creator and is often referred to as the problem of theodicy or "God's justice"; or simply the problem of evil. Buddhists, free of the scourge of a personified creator, had a number of approaches to explaining suffering but one of the principal reasons is the belief that we are repeatedly reborn in one or other of the realms of saṃsāra. To be reborn is to suffer, and thus all Buddhists sought to end rebirth.
However, in this example, rebirth is a given. The belief in rebirth seems to have been ubiquitous in pre-modern India. Rebirth is not a conclusion, it is an axiom. That we are reborn is never in question for Buddhists. There are early Buddhist references to non-believers, but we don't know if they actually existed, because they did not leave their own records and where we have external confirmation (as through archaeology) we find Buddhist texts are quite unreliable witnesses to history. As we know, none of the characters in the Pāli stories can be linked to historical events. Indian history begins with writing and writing begins with Asoka. Before that we have archaeological evidence, such as potsherds or stupas, but this tends to shed light on cultures, not individuals.
As Sue Hamilton (2000) says repeatedly, Buddhists were interested in how certain things worked; they did not have much to say about whether or not anything existed.
It's worth noting that those religieux who believed in rebirth in Indian antiquity agreed that rebirth was a horrible fate. All the main religions of India are concerned with stopping the cycle of rebirths. That this was not always the case, and not native to Indo-European Indians, we can see by the celebration of Yama in the Ṛgveda as the hero who found the way to rebirth amongst the ancestors after death on earth. Yama is a Promethean figure in the Ṛgveda. The Vedic-speakers must have first encountered the idea of rebirth in India, and they must have seen it as a good thing at first. By the time of the early Upaniṣads, however, the goal of Brahmins had shifted from returning to the ancestors, to merging back into Brahman, in the sense of absolute being. Buddhists twisted the heroic figure of Yama and made him the Rāja of Naraya (or King of the hell realms) responsible for torturing evil-doers.
Is Dependent Origination a Causal Explanation?
Recall that the causal mode of explanation aims to explain something by showing a causal relation with something else. X explains Y, if X is the cause of Y. Superficially, the formula of dependent arising resembles a causal explanation, so much so that many modern Buddhists speak of dependent arising as a theory of causality. But this is inaccurate. Dependent arising tells us when causation happens, i.e. when the condition is present, but it does not explain how causation happens. Moreover, the relations between the twelve nidānas are extremely varied: ignorance is the condition for volitions, for example, but birth is the condition for death. In the latter we get a dramatic example of why this is not a theory of causation. If X causes Y, then we are left stating the proposition that "birth causes death". This is obviously false.
Of course one cannot die without first being born, but it would be ridiculous to say that birth is the cause of death. Such a causal explanation fails. Take the case of a person who dies at age 100. Their birth was 100 years prior. Just as Buddhists insisted on the presence of the condition, we too think of causation as happening locally both physically and temporally. A cause with a 100 year delay in fruition doesn't work as a causal explanation because the world is not static. We are constantly interacting with the world and it's living creatures; constantly experiencing causation at various levels.
There is a notable change in mode at bhava. Leading up to bhava the nidānas can, at a stretch, be understood as relating to experience. No one is quite sure what bhava is in this situation.
Bibliography
Faye, Jan.(2007). "The Pragmatic-Rhetorical Theory of Explanation." In Rethinking Explanation. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 43-68. Edited by J. Persson and P. Yikoski. Dordrecht: Springer.
Wilkinson, Sam. (2014). "Levels and Kinds of Explanation: Lessons from Neuropsychiatry."Frontiers in Psychology 5 (article 373): 1-9.
