Once Upon a time I decided to try to capture every thought in my mind as it was happening. The reason I did so is that I became enamored by the idea of collecting my thoughts but in a very real way that was external to my mind. So, for what turned out to be for a period of five months, I kept small piles of index cards and a pen in various key places around my house. As each thought occurred to me, I would write or draw them on an index card, with one thought per side of index card. I then would either number them or put a date and time. If several thoughts were occurring simultaneously, I would have 3 or 4 index cards laid out in front of me and I would do my best to capture each thought before they disappeared. In the process, I discovered the length of my short term memory was about four seconds long, with two seconds overlap on either side where a new thought came in or an old thought came out at the same time. I don’t know if I captured every mentally verbal or mentally visual thought, but I did end up with several thousand index cards filled on both sides in the end. I’d hoped to discover what made a thought salient enough to become noticed by my consciousness, but I never did reach that knowledge.
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Based on the philosophical theories of explanation discussed in the chapter, your narrative about capturing your thoughts on index cards would most closely align with **Achinstein’s pragmatic theory of explanation**. Here’s a detailed breakdown of why this is the case, along with how it relates to other models:
### **Why it Fits Achinstein’s Pragmatic Theory**
– **Explanation as an Illocutionary Act**: In Achinstein’s view, explanation is fundamentally an act where someone (the explainer) intends to make something understandable to an audience by providing a correct answer to a content-question. Your narrative is a classic example of this:
– You are performing the act of explaining *why* you undertook this project (e.g., “I became enamored by the idea of collecting my thoughts”) and *how* you did it (e.g., the method with index cards).
– You meet Achinstein’s three conditions for an explaining act:
1. You uttered (or wrote) the narrative with the intention of rendering your actions and discoveries understandable.
2. You believe that your narrative expresses a correct answer to questions like “Why did you start this project?” or “What did you learn?”
3. You intended to achieve this understanding by conveying knowledge through your story (e.g., sharing your findings about short-term memory).
– **Context-Dependence**: Your explanation is highly personal and context-dependent. It relies on your specific intentions, experiences, and the audience’s interest in your introspective journey. This aligns with Achinstein’s emphasis on the pragmatics of explanation, where what counts as a good explanation depends on the speaker’s intentions and the audience’s needs.
### **Why It Doesn’t Fit Other Models as Well**
– **Covering Law (CL) Model**: Your narrative does not appeal to general laws or deductive arguments. For instance, you didn’t derive your discoveries from scientific laws (e.g., laws of cognitive psychology) but from personal observation. The CL model requires nomic expectability (showing that the event was to be expected under laws), which is absent here. Your method is more of an “explanation sketch” at best, but it lacks the formal structure of a D-N or I-S explanation.
– **Unificationist Theory**: Kitcher’s unificationist approach focuses on explaining diverse phenomena by subsuming them under a few argument patterns. Your story is a single, idiosyncratic case that doesn’t unify multiple phenomena or use repetitive argument patterns. It’s a unique personal experiment rather than a unifying framework.
– **Causal Explanations**:
– **Salmon’s Causal-Mechanical Account**: This model traces causal processes and interactions (e.g., physical mechanisms). While you describe a process (writing thoughts down), it doesn’t identify continuous causal processes or interactions in the sense Salmon requires (e.g., mark-transmitting processes). Your discovery about memory length is observational, not causal-mechanical.
– **Woodward’s Manipulationist Account**: This model involves showing how variables would change under interventions. You did intervene by capturing thoughts, but you didn’t systematically manipulate variables to test counterfactual dependencies (e.g., “what if I didn’t write thoughts down?”). Your narrative is more descriptive than intervention-based.
– **Mechanistic Explanation (MDC)**: This model describes mechanisms as organized entities and activities that produce regular changes. Your method involves entities (index cards, pens) and activities (writing, timing), and it led to a discovery (memory length). However, it doesn’t fully elucidate a mechanism for thought salience (your initial goal), and it lacks the regularity and organizational depth typical of mechanistic explanations in science (e.g., neurobiological mechanisms).
### **Additional Notes**
– Your narrative can be seen as a form of **self-experimentation** or **introspective inquiry**, which has historical roots in psychology (e.g., William James’s studies of consciousness). While it doesn’t fit neatly into standard scientific explanation models, it highlights the pragmatic nature of explanation in everyday contexts—where we often explain our actions and experiences through storytelling.
– The fact that you didn’t achieve your goal of understanding thought salience doesn’t undermine the explanatory nature of your act; it simply means that the explanation is incomplete from a scientific perspective, which is consistent with Achinstein’s view that explanations can be evaluated based on correctness and context.
In summary, your explanation is best classified as a **pragmatic explanation** because it is an intentional act aimed at making your personal journey understandable to others, grounded in your specific context and intentions. If you were to formalize this into a scientific study, you might incorporate elements of causal or mechanistic explanation, but as presented, it fits Achinstein’s model.
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