“Description,” “Causal Explanation,” “Narrative Explanation.”

The paper will be written in two parts. The structure should loosely follow this schema: Part 1 (800-1500 words): • Please divide this part into sections with headers, e.g., “Description,” “Causal Explanation,” “Narrative Explanation.” • First describe the event plainly and objectively, laying out the facts clearly and avoiding explanation or commentary. Your model should be the scenarios in Exercises in Inference or Velleman’s “annals” or “chronicles” (“first the king died then the queen died”). You need to state the facts that both explanations share so that your reader will recognize what you’re explaining and so both explanations have a common ground. • Then explain the event in two different ways, one scientific (either causal or statistical relevance) and the other narrative. In this section of the paper, you will be performing abductive inference just as we did in “Exercises in Inference,” with the additional constraint that you will be reasoning toward particular kinds of explanation. Write for a general audience who hasn’t read the essays on explanation that you have. Your goal is, for example, to offer a causal explanation (using causal language and possibly causal maps) without talking about “causal models” or “counterfactual conditionals,” a story that doesn’t say “this is a narrative explanation.” Part 2 (1000-1500 words): • This part is a more like a typical argument essay with a thesis and topic sentences, quotations from the readings AND from your own part 1, and a consistent argument. Your purpose is to make the case that one of your explanations in part 1 is more successful than the other(s). Your thesis should state how you will achieve that—what your external criterion is, and your analysis should show the successes and failures of each explanation, ultimately favoring one. To be clear, you shouldn’t simply say that your narrative is better because it is emotional or your statistical relevance explanation is better because it is scientific: that’s a circular argument. Rather, imagine an external audience and purpose for these explanations and consider which would accomplish their goals better. Take your guiding question from van Fraassen: which explanation answers the implicit why question the best? For example, you might explain an injury you received while playing soccer differently to your doctor than to your friends, because those audiences care about different aspects of your life and you have different purposes for each. If your primary goal is to recover from your injury, the causal explanation to your doctor may be superior; if your primary goal is to educate young people considering following in your footsteps as a soccer player, a statistical relevance explanation informing them of the odds of suffering a severe injury may work best; if your primary goal is to elicit sympathy or “eww, gross: let me tell you about the worst injury I ever got” camaraderie, a narrative explanation may do what you need best. In other words, your thesis might say something like “While I can show that both of my explanations suit their respective situations well, I will argue that my statistical relevance explanation gives greater meaning to my injury by helping my intended audience avoid similar setbacks in the future. Telling the story of my gross broken leg is a good way to impress people and reinforce friendships, but that’s not enough to justify the life-changing anguish I suffered.” • To support your argument, quote part 1 and analyze your processes of inference and your explanations using the technical terms and tools described in the reading for this unit. This is where I want to see the language of abduction and especially the models of explanation. I want you to demonstrate that you can use the terminology and underlying reasoning of inference and explanation in a purposeful argument.