Science and scientific knowledge achieved high status in twentieth-century Western societies, yet there continues to be disagreement among scientists and those who study science (historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science) about the meaning...

Explanation The three cardinal aims of science are prediction, control, and explanation, but the greatest of these is explanation. It is also the most inscrutable: Prediction aims at truth, and control at happiness, and insofar as one has some...

. The process of making something intelligible, or saying why certain things are as they are, or the account used to do these things. The account is sometimes called the explanans, and the thing to be explained is called the explanandum. An explanation...

In philosophy, set of statements that makes intelligible the existence or occurrence of an object, event, or state of affairs. Among the most common forms of explanation are causal explanation (&see; causation), deductive-nomological explanation (&see;...

See also genre, non-fiction Explanation texts, one of the six kinds of non-fiction used in the 1998 National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching, explain a structure like that of a plant, animal or machine or a process like the working of the...

An explanation is a statement which points to causes, context, and consequences of some object, process, state of affairs, etc., together with rules or laws that link these to the object. Some of these elements of the explanation may be implicit. An...