Trustworthiness and explanation: The role of morality in solving problems of explanatory relevance

Within that portion of philosophy of science concerned with the nature of scientific (as well as general) explanation, has emerged a fundamental disagreement about the nature of explanatory relevance as a primary source of explanatory power. And while everyone agrees that being relevant within an explanation requires that the explaining fact have something to do with the fact to be explained, there is little agreement about what this means. As the debate about the nature of explanation has developed within different metaphysical frameworks, various answers to the "what is explanatory relevance?" question have been offered. Hempel and Oppenheim's (inferential epistemic) D-N and I-S accounts, for example, construed relevance as a function of being an instance of a law appearing as part of an explanans. Wesley Salmon's (ontic realist) objections to this (and other) account(s) of scientific explanation would require that relevance be located within the objective causal nexus underlying the events to be explained. Still other theorists (the erotetic) analyze relevance epistemically, in terms of an answer's responsiveness to a question asked. But as Salmon and others rightly point out, such analyses are fraught with difficulty--none of these epistemic analyses appear able to provide adequate criteria for an answer's correctness (i.e., criteria for its relevance to the question). In order to get a clear view of the problems of relevance within an epistemic/erotetic account, I present two of the leading erotetic models--one semantic, the other speech-act theoretic. I then distill the most pointed realist objections against them and show how both suffer from the same structural difficulty. As a way toward acquiring a fresh perspective, I then present a third erotetic account (also within the speech-act tradition) and argue that its conceptions of 'problem-situations' and explanatory requests suggest a line of analysis previously unexplored. I proceed to show that an inquirer's status as epistemically dependent, her question as a request for help, and her need to trust her interlocutor, all suggest that recasting the problems of relevance into moral terms may resolve these difficulties as they are epistemically conceived. Finally, I argue that a respondent's trustworthiness is capable of underwriting the necessary epistemic claims, and proceed to develop a set of criteria according to which one may qualify as trustworthy to explain. I conclude by showing how a respondent's trustworthiness addresses the difficulties present within each of the three erotetic accounts examined, and argue that this result suggests that trustworthiness is fundamental to an erotetic conception of explanation.