Can Science Explain Everything? Anything? by theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg. “Description” vs. “explanation.”

It might be supposed that something is explained when we find its cause, but an influential 1913

paper by Bertrand Russell had argued that “the word ’cause’ is so inextricably bound up with

misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary

desirable.”2 This left philosophers like Wittgenstein with only one candidate for a distinction between

explanation and description, one that is teleological, defining an explanation as a statement of the

purpose of the thing explained.

E.M. Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread gives a good example of teleology making the

difference between description and explanation. Philip is trying to find out why his friend Caroline

helped to bring about a marriage between Philip’s sister and a young Italian man of whom Philip’s

family disapproves. After Caroline reports all the conversations she had with Philip’s sister, Philip

says, “What you have given me is a description, not an explanation.” Everyone knows what Philip

means by this—in asking for an explanation, he wants to learn Caroline’s purposes. There is no

purpose revealed in the laws of nature, and not knowing any other way of distinguishing description

and explanation, Wittgenstein and my friend had concluded that these laws could not be

explanations. Perhaps some of those who say that science describes but does not explain mean also

to compare science unfavorably with theology, which they imagine to explain things by reference to

some sort of divine purpose, a task declined by science. New York Review of Books