On Explaining
Understanding What it is to be Human, From all Sides of the Equation
An essay on understanding what it is to be human from all sides at once. Explaining, here, is examined as an act with a built-in limit: every explanation is given from somewhere, and the human being is precisely the thing that shows up differently depending on where you stand to describe it. The piece tries to hold several sides at once — the scientific, the felt, the moral — without letting any one of them claim to be the whole. It is a natural companion to On Explaining's sibling pieces on method and questioning, and one of the clearest statements of why the explanatory gap, in this framework, is lived in rather than closed.
Read it beside On Questioning and On Computing, and the three form the series' running argument about the limits of any single account. This essay's particular move is to refuse the temptation to pick one side as the true one, insisting instead that the human being is exactly what looks different from every side at once.
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