The nature of explanation

One of the most fundamental properties of thought is its power of predicting events. This gives it immense adaptive and constructive significance as noted by Dewey and other pragmatists. It enables us, for. instance, to design bridges with a sufficient factor of safety instead of building them haphazard and waiting to see whether they collapse, and to predict consequences of recondite physical or chemical processes whose value may often be more theoretical than practical. In all these cases the process of thought, reduced to its simplest terms, is as follows: a man observes some external event or process and arrives at some 'conclusion' or 'prediction' expressed in words or numbers that 'mean' or refer to or describe some external event or process which comes to pass if the man's reasoning was correct. During the process of reasoning, he may also have availed himself of words or numbers. Here there are three essential processes: