Kenneth Black

Order-of-explanation objections say that some philosophical view implies p because q, when it’s more natural to say that q because p; and since such mirroring explanations are presumed to be incompatible, the targeted view must be in conflict with the intuitive explanation. I argue that order-of-explanation objections are weaker than they seem, focusing on two cases: functionalism/dispositionalism about mental states and Humeanism about laws of nature. Examining our ordinary practices of explanation, I identify two kinds of explanations, which I call conceptual and contextualizing explanations, which can be jointly compatible even when they mirror one another. This suggests a way of responding to order-of-explanation objections: if the targeted philosophical views offer conceptual explanations, and the intuitive explanations they mirror are contextualizing, then the order-of-explanation objections have no bite.

In conversation, we make use of shared information in order to communicate. But what shared information? In theorising about conversation, it’s popular to allot a privileged position to a single body of information: the common ground (roughly, what all participants in a conversation take for granted). I argue that we need a more nuanced view—a single body of information is not enough to characterise how conversation works. As proof of concept, I focus on indicative conditionals. Orthodoxy holds that indicative conditionals are felicitous only when their antecedents are compatible with the common ground. I marshal linguistic data to show this can’t be right. Instead, different conversational goals may impose different constraints on the use of indicative conditionals. Nevertheless, I argue that the orthodox constraint on indicative conditionals may be ceteris paribus true, with violations to be explained on a case-by-case basis, and defend this kind of approach to pragmatics.