Although describing and explaining are distinguishable, they are also in an important sense inseparable. The descripitive and explanatory resources of language advance hand-in-hand.
— Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities §108
- These two kinds of discursive activity; one can be describing in a particular act and not explaining (and vice-versa).
- Globally, they’re only intelligible in terms of their relation to
each other.
- (describing is placing in a space of implications, which is relevant for explanation.
- The claim that matters: you couldn’t have an language in use that had one and not the other.
- The reason is at least that in order to describe something you have to place it in a space of implications (i.e. the above quote)