What is the difference between argument and explanation

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They need to be evaluated in a different way. When a circular explanation is fallacious it is because it is uninformative or useless in transferring understanding. As with arguments, however, an explanation can be circular, but still be useful as an explanation. One reason is that there are feedback processes in nature, and to explain what is happening, the account given needs to go in a circle.

For example, the more overweight a diabetic gets, the more insulin is produced in his blood, but the more insulin there is in his blood, the more he eats, and the more he becomes overweight.

In this vicious circle, the problem becomes worse and worse by a continual process of feedback that escalates it. To understand that the process is circular helps to explain the whole picture of what is going on. Let us return to our warehouse dialogue from Section 2. Now extend the dialogue as follows:. But why do the older buildings lend the town its distinctive character? When examining this dialogue we might be suspicious about the possibility that it contains the fallacy of begging the question.

After all, when Allen is asked by Beth about the justification for preserving the old warehouses 4 , Allen replies that the warehouses are valuable architecturally 5. But then later, at his last move in the dialogue 7 , he reverts back to making the same statement again. It definitely appears that the dialogue is circular. The question then is whether the circularity is benign or vicious. Now the reasoning in the dialogue is no longer just a sequence of argumentation, but a mixture of argumentation and explanation Fig.

In order to prove his claim that the warehouses are valuable architecturally, Allen has used the premise that the older buildings lend the town its distinctive character. But then he has used the former as an explanation to help Beth understand the latter.

The sequence of replies is then circular but not fallacious. Allen is merely explaining why the older buildings lend the town its distinctive character. Since Beth has agreed to this proposition, Allen does not need to prove it, and so there is no interdependency in the sequence of argumentation of the kind required for the committing of the fallacy of begging the question.

There is no failure to fulfill the probative function of the kind that signals circular reasoning of a kind associated with committing the fallacy of begging the question.

Allen is not using premise p to prove conclusion q and then using q as a premise required to prove p. This is an unusually subtle case to disentangle.

There is a circularity there, but it is benign one where the explanation fits into the argumentation in a way that is not an obstruction to the dialogue. The circularity could help Beth to understand the situation. So it does have a legitimate function. There is circular reasoning, but no circular argumentation.

How then, given the text of discourse, are we to determine whether the text is better taken to represent an argument or an explanation? The test widely adopted in logic textbooks uses the distinction between an accepted fact and a disputed claim was discussed in Section 2. But we need to go even beyond that and look more broadly at how arguments and explanations function as different kinds of moves in a dialogue.

An argument is a speech act used to convince the hearer of some unsettled claim and an explanation is a speech act used to help the hearer to understand something. This distinction can be drawn as one of a difference of purpose of discourse. Since the distinction is drawn this way, it can be seen to be based on a dialogue model of communication in which two parties take turns in putting forward speech acts.

As argued above, in order to then determine whether something is an argument or an explanation, we need not just look at the original intention of the speaker i. Defining explanation as a speech act put forward with the aim of transferring understanding from an explainer to an explainee raises further questions. What is understanding, and how can it be transferred from one party to another?

This common knowledge can be modeled as explanation schemes or scripts [ 24 ]. An explanation scheme is a generic scenario, an abstract rendering of a sequence of actions or events of a kind. For example, the restaurant-script contains information about the standard sequence s of events that take place when somebody goes to dine in a restaurant.

Take, for example, a man who enters a restaurant, orders a hamburger and then removes his pants and offers the waiter his pants. This particular story is incoherent, because it does not adhere to the typical restaurant scheme. But if this story fits another explanation scheme it can still be coherent.

Thus, an explanation may be causal, motivational, teleological, and so on. A dialogue model of explanation can then be constructed by building it around the notion of the mutual comprehensibility of a story, or connected sequence of events or actions that both parties can at least partially grasp in virtue of their common knowledge about the ways things can be generally expected to happen in situations they are both familiar with.

This is the route taken by Schank and his colleagues in cognitive science cf. An explanation, on this approach, is a repair process used to help someone account for the anomaly by using scripts that could be taken from script libraries. We now propose an example of a dialogue system for argumentation and explanation, based on the protocols presented by [ 5 , 27 ]. Our dialogue system consists of a communication language that defines the possible speech acts in a dialogue, a protocol that specifies the allowed moves at any point in the dialogue and commitment rules , which specify the effects of a speech act on the propositional commitments of the dialogue participants.

Furthermore, we assume that both players have their own separate knowledge bases containing argumentation schemes and explanation schemes, which form the basis of arguments and explanations proposed in the dialogue [ 21 ].

In a game for argumentation and explanation, essentially two types of dialogue are combined: explanation dialogue [ 8 , 17 , 27 ] and examination dialogue [ 10 ]. In a pure explanation dialogue the explainer is trying to transfer understanding to the explainee; an examination dialogue can be used to test evaluate an explanation.

Examination dialogues are more adversarial. Figure 4 shows the combination of explanation and examination dialogues as a process.

The speech acts of a game for explanation and argumentation are presented in the typical format F p , where F is the illocutionary force and p is the propositional content. These speech acts are standard in systems for argumentative dialogue cf.

Now, for explanation we need other speech acts, as defined by [ 5 , 27 ]. Note that with explanation, the issue is not whether a player is convinced i. Commitment rules specify the effect of moving with one of the speech acts. A player becomes committed to any claim, argument or explanation he puts forward, and also to any claim he concedes to.

Commitments can be retracted by the retract speech act. The following standard protocol rules are part of the dialogue system cf. The above rules capture the basics of argumentative dialogue. The rules encapsulate the idea that argumentation is an activity aimed at proving or disproving some claim: once both parties are committed to a claim, there is no point in arguing any further.

For explanation the rules are different, as explanation is aimed at improving understanding. Both parties can be committed to a claim, but one of the two may not fully understand it. Note how explaining is in a sense analogous to arguing but with a different aim, namely making someone understand a proposition instead of committing them to it. The system can be applied to the two examples taken from the logic textbook [ 14 ], the Challenger spacecraft example and the example about the digestive system of a cow.

These are classified as explanations because of the rules stating that players are only allowed to argue for or against propositions to which the other player is not committed.

In the one example it is taken as common knowledge that the Challenger spacecraft exploded after liftoff. In the other example, it is taken to be common knowledge that cows can digest grass while humans cannot. Therefore both parties can be taken to be committed to both these propositions. Hence in both examples, it would be inappropriate for either party to argue either for or against these propositions.

However it would be appropriate for either party to offer an explanation. Briefly, it can be shown how a script is involved in the spacecraft example as follows.

To make the explanation successful the party to whom it was directed must have enough general knowledge about how rockets work, how a rocket can explode, and to connect an O-ring failure to a leakage of fuel. There must also be knowledge about what might normally be expected to happen when a fuel leak occurs during the operation of the rocket motor. The receiver of the explanation must also know that the booster rockets are attached to the spacecraft in such a way that if the booster rocket explodes, the whole spacecraft that is attached to it will also explode.

To connect all these events into a coherent script that explains how the spacecraft exploded after liftoff the receiver of the explanation must already have the common knowledge required to understand how this series of events and objects is connected up into a coherent story.

How the system applies to the example dialogue about the warehouses is indicated in Fig. As noted, the speech act could be interpreted as requesting either an argument or an explanation. There was another ambiguous speech act when Beth asks Allen why the warehouses are so valuable.

This speech act could be interpreted as requesting either an argument or an explanation, as noted in the discussion of the case in Section 2. The system manages these cases by analyzing them as instances where the evidence given in the dialogue exchange is insufficient to classify the speech act as either an argument or an explanation.

The system needs to then follow up by shifting to an examination dialogue where the dialogue participant who asked the question needs to be examined and must indicate whether he or she is putting forward the speech act as an argument on explanation.

In many instances, especially the short ones like those found in the logic textbooks, the text of the case is merely given, and there is no possibility of examining the questioner. In such cases we need to make a determination based on the given textual and contextual evidence. It is our contention that this determination needs to be made in the framework provided by our hybrid system of dialogue for argument and explanation.

We have presented only relatively simple examples, or at any rate short ones, that can fit the space confines of this paper. However, we would suggest as a project for further research applying the dialogue system comprising both arguments and explanations to longer examples of dialogues of the kind that can already be found in the literature. This literature is about explanation systems, but it could be helpful to re-examine the examples used in them, as well as other longer texts containing explanations, using this new system.

In some instances of applying our system to problematic cases where there are ambiguous instances of questions that could be requests for either explanations or arguments, participants will need to extend the dialogue by having a clarification dialogue used to deal with ambiguity. In addition to the dialogue systems that combine argumentation and explanation as proposed in [ 5 , 27 ], there are numerous explanations systems that incorporate the ideas about transferring understanding through explanations.

In this system, explanations are directed towards filling knowledge gaps revealed by anomalies. Examples of explanations processed by ACCEPTER along the lines of the dialogue sequence above, include the death of a race horse, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the recall of Audi cars for transmission problems, and an airliner that leaves from the wrong departure gate [ 15 , p.

MOPS help an agent understand by providing expectations on how things can normally be expected to go in a familiar situation.

MOPS are comparable to the stories used in the hybrid theory. A simplified version of the explanation of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger modeled by Leake [ 15 , pp.

This version of the explanation [ 15 , p. The boosters burned through, allowing flames to reach the main fuel tank, causing an explosion.

According to the engineers, the explosion was caused by the booster seals being brittle and the cold weather. This causal sequence can be displayed in the hybrid theory as shown in Fig. The arrows with filled heads represent causal relations, while the arrows with white heads represent arguments. Reasoning can be used for many purposes, and providing evidence that a certain statement is true is only one. Other reasoning aims to give a reason or reasons why a certain statement is true; such reasoning is an explanation.

How can you tell the difference between an argument and an explanation? Since the difference is one of purpose, ask what purpose a piece of reasoning serves. Test your understanding of the difference with the following examples. The authors are not trying to convince you that the planets move differently than the stars, but to explain why they do so.