Explanation

Different styles of explanation employ different patterns. In narrative explanation, people tell a story concerning how events come about. Explanation by elimination occurs when a phenomenon is explained away as being nonexistent. Explanation by deduction is powerful in mathematical fields such as physics, but is rarely possible in more qualitative fields such as biology, psychology, and sociology. In these fields, the most useful approach is mechanistic, where events are explained by showing how they causally result from regular changes in systems of connected and interacting parts. Like explanation, causality cannot be captured by a simple analysis in terms of universal regularities, manipulations, probabilities, or causal networks. Rather, a three-analysis marks all of these as typical features of causal relations, on top of familiar exemplars such as pushes and pulls.