Talk:Explanandum and explanans

Notability
Seems we have a definition and quotes from a 1948 book regarding some philosopher's made up word. No secondary sources, no evidence of usage, nothing - and it's been here for six years? Can anyone justify its existance? Vsmith (talk) 00:38, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

I have two points against what you said: 1) All terms were made up at one point. So if the criticism is that making up a term makes it subject to removal, it follows that we should remove all terms from wikipedia since they are all made up at one point. 2) If the criterion requires that someone be a non-philosopher to make up a term, then of course explanandum should be removed. But it is obvious that wikipedia doesn't just remove terms made up by philosophers because I learned a number of terms from wikipedia which were formulated by philosophers and were never removed on that basis. I think the important question is whether the term is of significant enough (i.e., regularly used by multiple people say within a discipline) to keep a page on it. In which case, I will not only attest that we regularly use the term explanandum but have been using it for quite some time. In fact, Oxford has it in the dictionary. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199533008.001.0001/acref-9780199533008-e-779. As does encyclopedia.com http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-explnndmndxplnnsxplcndmnd.html. About.com even mentions it in a discussion on explanation: http://atheism.about.com/od/logicalarguments/a/explanation.htm.

Now, here is the major issue with this page. Explanandum doesn't make much sense as an individual article, since in order to understand explanandum you need to really understand what an explanan is. since this is so, the two concepts should be merged into one page. Also, since they are both part of what an explanation is, they should probably be merged into explanation as well (Brandon Michaud (talk) 11:07, 28 August 2014 (UTC)).


 * Great - feel free to merge. Vsmith (talk) 12:06, 28 August 2014 (UTC)

Vsmith should be kicked out of any discussions on this topic. I am a professor of philosophy. The articles referred to here are not by just a few schmucks, but by the most noted philosophers writing on the topic of scientific explanation (on a par with Karl Popper the Postivists, and other famous writers on the topic). Calling Hempel "some philosopher" displays Vsmith's utter lack of research or respect for the area of research referred to in this article, and the scholars engaged in it. If you look up any academic articles on the theory of explanation, chances are you will find them referring to one or another of Hempel's contributions to the theory of scientific explanation. If you Google the cited articles, you'll see a citation count in the thousands. Hempel's and Oppenheimer's first well-known theory is the oft-referred to "DN" theory, or "deductive nomological theory of explanation". Just to mention one authoritative source, look at the Stanford Encyclopedia's article on Scientific Explanation, which leads off with an extensive discussion of Hempel's theory. The main point. A blatant non-expert, Vsmith, is castigating an article for citing "some philosopher" without the castigator doing any homework - not a jot - not even a simple Google search of the terms explained in this article, or the subject matter of scientific explanation (if Vsmith had done so, such a search would quickly bring up the just-cited Stanford Encyclopedia article, not to mention settling any qualms about notability). For shame. If you know nothing about philosophy you should either (a) keep your opinions to yourself, or (b) engage in some research where you explore your doubts with an open mind but a scholar's discipline, before offering criticisms.

I suggest amending the article with some technical points. The terms 'explanans' and 'explanandum' are used because of their Latin declensions, which provide a precision that is lacking in English. The endings '-ns' and '-ndum' are not only adopted by Hempel, they have been adopted by many other analytic philosophers, logicians, mathematicians and (shudder) scientists, as suffixes appended to common English terms, to mark the distinction between a focal topic and an account given of it. It is common practice, for example, to use 'definiens' and 'definiendum' (also originally Latin) to distinguish between a term or phrase that is being defined (the definiendum) and the proffered definition (the definiens). The suffixes are also sometimes used to mark the distinction between a concept being analyzed (the analysandum) and the analysis of that concept (the analysans). And so on. We wouldn't use these terminological tactics if we didn't need to make the distinction and English had more precise declensions by which to do so. Accordingly, we do not just "make them up." And finally, because such terminological moves are plentiful, especially in technical philosophy and logic, and are often left unexplained, hence opaque to the non-initiated, this Wikipedia article will be quite useful for people exploring the topic. Conceptual Clarity Guy (talk) 02:32, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Sentence or phenomen?
The first sentence has a problem. “An explanandum … is a sentence describing a phenomenon that is to be explained”. Okay, got that. Then later it gives a smoke/fire example that concludes: “In this example, "smoke" is the explanandum, and "fire" is the explanans.” Here smoke is the phenomenon, a noun, and is not a sentence. I believe the sentence needs to be revised to clarify that the entire sentence is not the explanandum but rather thing that is to be explained. I’m not really a Philosophy person so I would recommend someone who believes this is a flaw and is educated in the subject consider a modification. Sych (talk) 19:35, 14 November 2021 (UTC)