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aken with a flip like Daisy. (Sound familiar? The same fact can be used to explain opposites which means it has no predictive and therefore no explanatory value at all.)

A common indicator as to whether something is a bad explanation is whether it can be used to explain contradictory outcomes. Thus a standard criticism (one of very many) of the claim of global warming theories to be genuinely scientific (as opposed to – as some critics contend – essentially religious theories or political theories) is that whatever happens to the weather, it is regarded as explicable in terms of global warming! Such an ‘explanation’ in reality explains nothing.

Rationalizations often have a ‘feel good’ quality; it all seems to fit together nicely. But that is never sufficient for something to be a (good) explanation.

TASK 2: Consider the writings in your primary study area; do any of them seem to offer mere rationalizations when they should be offering explanations? Why do you think this is so? Consider also media commentary on current events. Can you find any examples of rationalizations being passed off as explanations?

4. Multiple and Rival Explanations

Can there be more than one explanation of the same event? Indeed there can. But surely there can be only one correct explanation of a given event? For are not alternative explanations rival explanations? Indeed they are.

Consider, for example, two rival explanations of the apparent movement of heavenly bodies. For many centuries the prevailing explanation was the geocentric theory, articulated by the 3rd century AD Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. This is the theory that the Earth is a sphere at the centre of the universe and all of the heavenly bodies, including our sun and moon, revolve around it in circular orbits (or circular orbits as later refined with epicycles and other little circular adornments). By the time of the late 17th century the generally preferred theory (developed by Copernicus and Galileo among others) was the heliocentric theory. This is the theory that the sun is at the centre of our solar system (not the universe – its overall shape, and therefore the sun’s position, was regarded as an unknown), and the Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, in the case of Earth completing one orbit in one year. In addition, in contrast to Ptolemy’s view that the Earth was rigid; the later heliocentric theorists such as Galileo contended that the Earth moved not only around the sun but also on its own north-south axis, completing one revolution every 24 hours.

Both theories attempted to explain exactly the same observations of the heavens. Both theories had considerable predictive power. Neither was infallible in its predictions, both had an error rate which was higher for the geocentric theory (but it always proved possible to patch both theories as they went to address the erroneous predictions, thus steadily improving predictive power over time).

Were these mutually compatible explanations of what we could observe in the heavens? Indeed they were; for example only on the heliocentric theory does the Earth move. But is there anything that can be explained on one theory that cannot be explained on the other? There was not. But has not the geocentric theory been refuted? It has not. Rather, it has been abandoned. Eventually, scientists just quietly walked away from it.

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