Explanatory Breadth Without Criteria Is Not Explanation: A Case for Disciplined Generality in Scientific Theory Construction
Explanatory Breadth Without Criteria Is Not Explanation:
Disciplined Generality in Scientific Theory Construction
Highlights
- The paper defines criteria for disciplined theory travel across levels.
- The paper distinguishes theory-quality evaluation from cross-domain specification.
- It identifies evaluative and internal-constraint conditions for disciplined theory travel.
- Stress cases show when generality explains rather than redescribes.
- Occam’s razor is recast as a constraint against redescription without criteria.
Scientific theories are often treated as deeper when they apply across more domains, scales, or classes of phenomena. This inference is unsafe. A principle may travel widely because it captures a genuine common structure, but it may also travel widely because its terms are too under-specified to resist application.
This paper proposes disciplined generality as a methodological standard for broad theories and reconsiders a central question: when can a theory be regarded as having a scientific structure? I argue that explanatory breadth requires not only familiar theory-quality virtues such as falsifiability, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness, but also internal specifications governing cross-domain travel.
A broad theory should state the observational grounds from which its principle is derived, what follows and does not follow from that principle, what would count against it, how its concepts transform across levels and perturbations, and which variables are preserved, transformed, hidden, integrated, or eliminated during explanatory transfer.
The argument is developed through illustrative stress cases: free-energy and active-inference accounts, string theory, and evolutionary adaptationist explanation as cases of under-disciplined breadth, and plate tectonics and the periodic system as positive contrasts.
The paper further argues that formal coherence does not establish realizability, and that Ockham’s razor should be understood not merely as a preference for simplicity but as a constraint against redescription without criteria. Without such discipline, explanatory breadth is not yet a theory, principle, mechanism, framework, or model. It is an illusory label that allows redescription to pass as explanation.
