On the nature of explanations

My friend Basia stopped by this morning. She had read the posting on ‘salience’ on this blog and asked for an explanation as to why a person experiencing psychosis has difficulty determining salience. Thinking about her question led me into this digression about the process of developing explanations.

It’s interesting that we humans seem to have such a strong need to have explanations. After all, what is an explanation other than a set of concepts that appear to make sense out of some observations and experiences we have had, (the same process, by the way, that, according to salience model, leads to delusions).

If explanations are concepts, it’s worth thinking about concepts for a moment. The cognitive neurosciences view our mental world as being made up of a complex framework of interconnected concepts that are, of course, our own creation.

Contemplative science agrees but adds the insight that concepts are inherently dualistic. For example, ‘psychosis’ is a concept. By creating ‘psychosis’, we automatically create ‘non-psychosis’. Concepts separate off ‘entities’, defined sections of phenomena, from what is actually an interconnected web.

The contemplative sciences emphasize the difference between the kinds of ‘truth’ (explanation) we can discover with concepts (relative truth) and the actual ‘truth’ of how the world functions (absolute truth). The latter is beyond concept.

Relative truth, the use of concepts, is seen as useful, but it becomes problematic when we mistake relative truth for absolute, which we do all the time. We forget that we ‘made up’ the concepts and we believe that they are inherently ‘real’.

A final thought for this digression: perhaps we don’t always need a firm (and certainly not a fixed) explanation for everything. As the old saying goes “it’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you think you know that ain’t so”.