When Mystery's All That's Left

Our collaborator on this blog, the esteemed Mr.Wolfus Andronicus, has launched a compelling attack on many of the central claims of Jim Brown’s Platonic account of thought experiments. I am very sympathetic to most of the concerns raised in his paper. In particular, I share his worry as to how Brown proposes to arbitrate between (apparently) Platonic TE’s which disagree. I want, however, to draw attention to a point which I think is certainly challengeable. This is the claim that for an explanation to be acceptable, the explanans cannot be a bigger mystery than the explanandum. Mr. Andronicus continues, that by which we explain some phenomenon must be “comparatively more acceptable, palatable, understood, uncontroversial…” (pg.15). This is apparently put forward as a universal regulatory principle by which we can eliminate faulty explanations. It seems to me, however, that it is going to toss out many a good baby with the bathwater. There are extremely fruitful explanations, especially in science, which seem to violate this principle. It seems to me that scientists often work something like in the following way. They begin with some observable phenomenon (the explanandum) which is itself wholly uncontroversial. Then various explanations for this phenomenon are considered. Controversy ensues over which is the correct explanation. More often than not, a consensus is eventually reached. The move here is from an uncontroversial explanandum to an (at least initially) highly controversial explanans. Perhaps it is the terms 'controversial' and 'palatable' that are throwing me here(if so, I'm not sure how crucial Mr. Andronicus takes this point to be.)So what I am suggesting is that sometimes a controversial, initially unpalatable explanans turns out to in fact be the best or only way to make sense of the (uncontroversial) phenomenon to be explained. Likewise, it could in principle turn out that the epistemic power of (platonic) thought experiments could only be accounted for by appeal to some heretofore unknown faculty of platonic perception. The fact that such perception is more mysterious than what it is supposed to explain is thus in my view not enough to rule out the possibility that it is explanatorily indispensable. If it were indispensible in this fashion, it might still not provide a satisfying or unmysterious explanation. But it would be the best we could do. Of course, the mystery of Platonic perception may still provide good reasons to prefer another explanation if such is available.It suggests to me that the Platonic account should be a last resort to turn out to when all other attempts to explain what TE's do fail.