What makes a good explanation?

What this prompt is really asking

Each of the twelve TOK concepts gives you a different way into a prompt. These are the ones that do the most work here.

• Explanation

  Grounds of Knowledge · primary lens

  The prompt asks for the criteria directly, and the useful answer shows that scope, simplicity and depth can pull against each other.

  An account of why something is the case rather than merely that it is. Explanations are judged by more than accuracy: scope, simplicity, fruitfulness and the ability to say what would have happened otherwise all matter, and these criteria can pull against one another.

• Truth

  Status of Knowledge

  A false explanation can be satisfying and a true one can be useless, so the prompt has to separate explanatory virtue from accuracy.

  The property a claim has when things are as it says they are. Whether truth is correspondence to a world, coherence within a system, or what enquiry would settle on in the long run is itself contested, and different areas of knowledge lean on different answers.

Where the knowledge framework bites

Reached through this prompt’s concepts, in the framework’s canonical order.

Scope

Explanation: Whether a field seeks explanations at all, rather than descriptions, predictions or interpretations, is a scope question. Mathematics proves, history accounts for, the natural sciences model, and the arts can illuminate without explaining anything propositional.

Truth: Areas of knowledge do not all mean the same thing by a true claim. Mathematical truth is truth within a system of assumptions, historical truth is answerable to surviving evidence, and asking whether a work of art is true requires a different sense of the word altogether.

Methods and tools

Explanation: Methods determine which explanations are reachable. A field that can only observe correlations will produce explanations shaped like correlations, and its inability to intervene is a fact about its tools rather than about its subject matter.

Truth: Each discipline has procedures for provisionally settling what will be treated as true: proof, replication, corroboration of sources, critical consensus. Studying those procedures is the practical way into the question of what truth is here.