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Evolutionary psych provides a nice example of how having a good explanation for something does not imply you understand it—and why the "goodness" of the explanation is not a guide to its truth. (From my lecture today to @sfiscience's Complex Systems School; brief 
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Consider a "peacock's tail" explanation for why men get useless college degrees: it's a costly signal of fitness, and so the behavior was selected for in evolutionary time. This is (on the face of it) a good explanation, at least under a number of accounts of explanatory virtue.
It is certainly something that many people find satisfying as an explanation, and it's one of the reasons (IMO) that evo psych is so common in popular science books.
The problem is that the explanation is equally well satisfied by a world in which the men who get these useless degrees have more children, and a world in which they have less. If the former, the additional children are proof that the peacock's tail still works...
If the latter, it's an evolutionary hangover, and men are simply playing a script that worked one, five, or fifty thousand years ago. The theory, in other words, makes no definite prediction above chance, and there's no (possible, in this cartoon version) evidence in its favor.
The explanation also provides no evidence that the explainer *understands* what's going on. If this seems counterintuitive, then consider what, exactly, the person's understanding consists in—what other mental faculties does having the explanation provide evidence for?
That's not to say that we should rule out evolutionary explanations on (say) Popperian grounds! Only that explanation, understanding, and truth are not equivalent or subsidiary concepts. They can be separated out, in certain circumstances.
To my mind, this is a useful example to tease out @DavidDeutschOxf's claim about the centrality of "good" explanations for human progress and (to me) suggests that there's something more to be (ha) explained. /end
Yes. We're interested in the history of explanation-making as a scientific question in and of itself—and less on the normative question of whether what people believe is a good explanation are right in doing so... https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/1320811669245825026?s=20
Some explanatory heuristics (e.g., unification) are good in (say) physics, but bad (right now) in psychology—and vice versa. I'm, personally, a Spinozan on this, meaning I expect "in the final analysis" explanatory goodness, as a normative matter, to itself have an explanation.
Let me defend biologists! If a fire-breathing dragon was discovered, it would completely revise our theories of evolution. Books would be re-written; it wouldn't be a matter of adding an exception case. Evolution is a terrific scientific idea. https://twitter.com/diomavro/status/1320815592891404288?s=20
...but it depends upon a whole framework of knowledge from elsewhere; knowledge of ecosystems, of intra- and interspecific interactions, of biochemistry, of how biochemistry tinkers via genetic assembly.
The same can't be said for culture ; evo psych is much closer to your dragon example, @diomavro. We don't know very many universal laws, or regularities in social evolution. Much of our knowledge comes from cognitive science, and we're only just beginning to scale things up.
The explanation would have to be unfolded further; as it stands, it doesn't do enough.
In the presence of a "bad" explanation, like that one, people might altruistically try to make it better—attempt to see something in there that *is* good... https://twitter.com/Moshe_Hoffman/status/1320832578388062208?s=20
In the presence of a "bad" explanation, like that one, people might altruistically try to make it better—attempt to see something in there that *is* good... https://twitter.com/Moshe_Hoffman/status/1320832578388062208?s=20
But that's a problem, because we'll see different things. So if I tried to "test the theory" (explanation), I would first have to invent a better explanation—and it would probably be different from yours. So we'd fail to make progress; it would be a (normatively) bad explanation.
I reference this up-thread, but here's one way into it. If the explanation above shows that the person understands something, *what*, in particular, does the person understand? https://twitter.com/Moshe_Hoffman/status/1320832931108057088?s=20
The fire-breathing dragon would cause us to revise beliefs about how evolution works (in a non-trivial fashion). It wouldn't, I think, count as evidence against the framework; but there are things that could (e.g., Hoyle's panspermia). https://twitter.com/diomavro/status/1320817303282475009?s=20
