Chapter 4 addresses four types of issues. First, I delve into the ambiguous status of the idea of legitimacy in the discourse on politics. Legitimacy is both omnipresent and an object of suspicion. On the one hand, it is one of the terms most frequently used in conversations on politics. On the other hand, especially in the academic disciplines that deal with the study of politics, the notion of political legitimacy has its detractors. There is intellectual nervousness about embracing it and relying on it. Second, comparing natural sciences and social sciences, I explore some of the features of what a theory is (description, explanation and predictability) and what this means for the theory of social phenomena that factors in political legitimacy. Third, I examine two different approaches of politics: politics mainly as power, and politics mainly as community. Fourth, I highlight the centrality of legitimacy for a theory of politics as community.

A distinction between types of methods (understanding and explanation) that generate different kinds of evidence relevant to the psychiatric assessment is characterised. The distinction is animated with both non-clinical and clinical examples and exercises. Scepticism about the distinction is addressed, and three influential systems of psychiatric knowledge which collapse understanding and explanation in different ways are discussed. The argument is made that the distinction (analogous to the romantic/classic distinction) resurfaces and is compelling. However, another challenge becomes important – holism in psychiatric assessment – which the understanding/explanation distinction leaves in an unsatisfactory state.

The Conclusion sums up the main results of the study and their philosophical relevance. It focuses on the notion of complete passive activities; Aristotle’s integration of causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception; his dynamic account of perception, which defies the standard dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism; the central dilemma for Aristotle’s endeavour to explain perception, as well as the prospects of the homeostatic solution; and finally the promise of the present study to also provide the groundwork for a better understanding of Aristotle’s account of intellectual cognition.

This chapter surveys influential ideas about scientific explanation. The idea that scientific explanation is a matter of logical deduction from scientific laws has played an important role both as the basis for positive accounts of scientific explanation and as a target of critical arguments spurring the investigation of alternative views. The chapter reviews some of the reasons in favor holding such a covering-law view of explanation and then turn to some alternatives. The chapter also considers a pragmatically oriented account of the act of explaining. Another alternative focuses on the idea that explanations unify phenomena, showing how seemingly different things are manifestations of a single truth about nature. Several approaches emphasize the way explanations indicate what causes something to happen, whether by reference to a process, a possible manipulation, or a mechanism.

As a field of knowledge History is exceptionally interested in the particular and specific rather than the universal and general – it is primarily idiographic rather than nomothetic. It is also centrally concerned with change over time. These two characteristics make History fundamentally a storytelling discipline. Its findings are most often presented in narrative form. Of course, many books do not follow one narrative from cover to cover. But research findings are most often presented as stories – not as reports of particular key results (as, for example, in a scientific lab report) or as the results of statistical analysis. Nomothetic disciplines tend toward examining a relatively narrow set of features of multiple cases in order to create generalizing theories and establish laws of regularity that define what will happen under a given set of circumstances at any and all times and places. History instead usually aims to organize into a coherent interpretation many features of a single case, exploring in detail what happened at a particular time, in a particular place. It often also aims to give us a complex, multifactor causal explanation of why it happened as it did, but usually that causal explanation is embedded in the narrative.

“Ars” came to be laden with specific meaning in the intellectual culture of late-Republican Rome, with some artes being regarded as intellectually and socially worthier than others. These “higher artes” were distinguished by several features that would form the premises for the scientific culture of the artes in the early Roman Empire. These premises were established in Rome by the reception of Greek notions of technê (τέχνη) but were elaborated independently and joined for the first time into a unified conception of specialized knowledge by Roman thinkers, including Cicero and Varro. The higher artes are logically organized and systematically presented, hence systematic. They are related to one another in their principles and methods, hence interdisciplinary. They entail explanatory knowledge of their methods in terms of causes in nature, and are hence explanatory. And they balance experience and practical know-how with theoretical knowledge, and are hence balanced.

Vitruvius’ De architectura (c. 35–23 BCE) offers an ideal lens through which to view the emergence of the Imperial artes. In the introduction to his work, Vitruvius develops an elaborate theory of architectural knowledge that connects the discipline with other branches of specialized knowledge and gives pride of place to causal explanations of architectural method via natural first principles. Vitruvius’ theory is tailored to architecture but is of wider importance in that it establishes a general notion of ars predicated on the scientific premises sketched in Chapter 2. True to his expansive conception of the discipline, throughout his treatise Vitruvius carefully explains his methods in terms of natural first principles, demonstrating their fundamental soundness. His advice for orienting city streets and walls (Book I) and for choosing building materials (Book II) exemplifies his characteristic interest in connecting architecture with a broader understanding of nature.

Chapter 1 introduces evolution theory and evolutionary explanation for studies of East Asian international relations and lays out the design of the whole book

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is integrated into the fabric of his system. We absorb into our thinking the concepts and relationships that have survived the successes and failures of experience (Phenomenology). Through disciplined thought we articulate the internal logic of those concepts (Logic). By working out what the world beyond thought would be like, seeing how the world instantiates those expectations, and then building those discoveries into our next ventures, we develop a systematic picture of the stages of natural complexity and human functioning (Philosophies of Nature and Spirit). Since Hegel’s time, however, we have discovered that nature has a history; time and space are no longer absolutes; the discoveries of science have expanded in both breadth and detail; and our comprehensive explanations for the way the world functions are continually being falsified by the discovery of new facts. A philosophy of nature, then, needs to reshape the way reason functions. Adopting the strategies we use to solve problems and that science uses to develop and test hypotheses, we broaden our perspective to cover multiple domains in nature and search for patterns that show how and why they fit together as they do.

The chapter begins with the observation that global history has an ambivalent attitude towards explanation. In many cases, the mere presentation of sources and voices from many different parts of the world seems sufficient to justify a global approach. The need for explanation is ignored or even denied. In other cases, global explanation is eagerly pursued, but often at the expense of more complex explanatory models that incorporate factors at different scales. In this perspective, global explanations are claimed to be inherently superior and a privileged way of explaining historical phenomena. After a cursory survey of current positions on causality and explanation in general methodology and ‘formal’ historical theory, the chapter proposes a brief typology of explanatory strategies. It goes on to discuss the peculiarities of explanation within a framework of connections across great distances and cultural boundaries. The much-exclaimed concept of narrative explanation is found to be of limited value, as it underestimates the difficulties of producing coherent narratives on a global scale. Concepts offered in the social science literature, such as the analysis of mechanisms and temporal sequences, could be helpful in refining purely narrative approaches to explanation.

The chapter delves into the specific kind of understanding aimed at in medicine, starting from the Understanding Thesis. Drawing on recent work by Broadbent (2019), debates in the epistemology of understanding (Kvanvig 2009; Grimm 2012; Khalifa 2017), and scholarship on the aims of inquiry, the chapter unpacks what it means to understand something, differentiating types of understanding, and using the history of scurvy to explore understanding a disease in medicine. The hypothesis is that biomedical understanding of a disease requires grasping a mechanistic explanation of the disease. This understanding of causal and constitutive relationships draws on an influential account of causation (Woodward 2003; 2010; 2015) and work on mechanistic explanations in biological sciences and neuroscience (Thagard 2003; 2005; Craver 2007; Nervi 2010; Kaplan and Craver 2011; Darrason 2018). However, it argues that biomedical understanding is necessary but not sufficient for clinical understanding, which combines biomedical understanding of a disease with personal understanding of an illness. This chapter revisits the distinction between "understanding" and "explanation" from debates in the field.

Communication of results of research is a critical step in science and entails all the other topics we have covered in relation to methodology. This communication usually is a written report (e.g., for a thesis or dissertation, granting agency, or journal article) or for presentation (e.g., poster session, conference presentation). In these different formats, there are common goals and requirements. In each format, the researcher’s challenge is to convey why the question that guides research is important and the way in which it has been addressed in the study is suitable. Methodology plays major roles throughout the processes of planning, conducting, interpreting, and communicating research results. Three interrelated tasks are involved in preparing a manuscript whether for a thesis, dissertation, presentation or journal article. These were described as description, explanation, and contextualization of the study. The writing we are routinely taught in science focuses on description, but the other portions are central as well and determine whether a study not only appears to be important but also in fact actually is. Recommendations were made regarding what to address and how to incorporate description, explanation, and contextualization within the different sections of a manuscript (e.g., Introduction, Method). In addition, questions were provided to direct the researcher to the types of issues reviewers are likely to ask about a manuscript.