How to Put Questions to Nature

Summary

Introduction

In this paper I propose to examine, and in part revive, a time-honoured perspective to inquiry in general and scientific explanation in particular. The perspective is to view inquiry as a search for answers to questions. If there is anything that deserves to be called a working scientist's view of his or her daily work, it surely is that he or she phrases questions and attempts to find satisfactory answers to them.

The perspective can be given several forms, depending on who or what the supposed answerer is. For Bacon and Kant the answerer was Nature: the idea was to force Nature to give conclusive answers to questions of the inquirer's choice. For some recent writers in the theory of explanation the interlocutor is a fellow inquirer: also scientific explanations are acts in which someone, by uttering an explaining utterance, explains to someone else why something is the case (see Achinstein, 1983 and Tuomela, 1980).

The latter idea is needed in the theory of explanation, because some constraints on acceptable explanations arise from the relationship between questions and answers. But this cannot be the whole story about specifically scientific explanation. If questions to fellow inquirers were sufficient, inquiry would be too easy, as Bacon so clearly saw. He acknowledged the power of old logic to systematize knowledge already available, but criticized it for its sterility in the acquisition of new information. Whatever the merits of Bacon's positive proposal, he surely got this aspect of inquiry essentially right: sooner or later the inquirer must come to terms with Nature, by putting questions to her.