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Explication
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Look up explicate in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Explication (German: Explikation) is the process of drawing out the meaning of something that is not clearly defined, so as to make explicit what is currently left implicit. In other words, "to explicate a concept is, roughly, to replace it with a similar but more theoretically useful concept".[1] The term explication is used in both analytic philosophy and literary criticism. German philosopher Rudolf Carnap was the first to coin the term in an analytic philosophical approach in his book Logical Foundations of Probability, while the term is supplanted with Gustave Lanson's idea of Explication de Texte when referring to the analysis and criticism of different forms of literature.
Carnap's notion of explication
[edit]Summary
[edit]In analytic philosophy, the concept of explication was first developed by Rudolf Carnap. Explication can be regarded as a scientific process which transforms and replaces "an inexact prescientific concept" (which Carnap calls the explicandum), with a "new exact concept" (which he calls the explicatum). A description and explanation of the nature and impact of the new explicit knowledge is usually called an "explication". The new explicit knowledge draws on, and is an improvement upon, previous knowledge.
On explication and truth
[edit]An explication in the Carnapian sense is purely stipulative, and thus a subclass of normative definitions. Hence, an explication can not be true or false, just more or less suitable for its purpose. (Cf. Rorty's argument about the purpose and value of philosophy in Rorty (2003), "A pragmatist view of contemporary analytic philosophy", in Egginton, W., and Sandbothe, M. (eds), The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy, SUNY Press, New York, NY.)
Examples of inexact daily life concepts in need of explication are our concepts of cause and of conditionals. Our daily life concept of cause does not distinguish between necessary causes, sufficient causes, complete causes etc. Each of these more precise concepts is an explication of our natural concept of cause.
Natural language will only specify truth conditions for propositions of the form "If p, then q" for situations where "p" is true. (Most of us probably don't have any clear intuitions regarding the truth conditions of the sentence "If I go out in the sun, I will get sunburned" in situations where I never go out in the sun.) An explication of the conditional will also specify truth conditions for situations where "p" is not true.
Reviews of Carnap's argument
[edit]Carnap's argument provides a helpful foundation in understanding and clarifying the nature and value of explication in defining and describing "new" knowledge.
Others' reviews of Carnap's argument offer additional insights about the nature of explication. In particular, Bonolio's paper (2003) "Kant's Explication and Carnap's Explication: The Redde Rationem", and Maher's (2007) "Explication defended", add weight to the argument that explication is an appropriate methodology for formal philosophy.
Use of the word "explication"
[edit]The word "explicate" is a verb referring to the process of explicating. The word "explication" is a noun referring to the outcome of that process: the explicative work itself.[2] As conceptual clarity is an important element of analytic philosophy, it is important to use words according to their proper definitions so as to avoid causing unnecessary confusion.
Semantic explication
[edit]In the natural semantic metalanguage theory, explications are semantic representations of vocabulary. These explications are made up of a very limited set of words called semantic primes which are considered to have universal meaning across all languages.
An example of an explication of the word happy[3]:
X feels happy =
sometimes someone thinks something like this:
something good happened to something
I wanted this
I don't want other things now
because of this, someone feels something good
X feels like this
What sets the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory's explications apart from previous theories, is that these explications can fit into natural language, even if it sounds very awkward. For example:[3]
The clown looks [happy]
The clown looks like [the clown thinks something like this: 'something good happened to me; I wanted this; I don't want other things now'; because of this, the clown feels something good].
Explications in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage are neither exact dictionary definitions, nor encyclopedic explanations of a concept. They often differ slightly depending upon the personal experiences of the person writing them. In this way, they can be said to "rely heavily on 'folk theories,' that is, the rather naive understandings that most of us have about how life, the universe, and everything work."[3] Explications of abstract concepts, such as color, do not list any scientific facts about the object or concrete definitions. Instead, the explications use comparisons and examples from the real world.
Explication, explication de texte, and literary criticism
[edit]The terms explication and explication de texte have different meanings.
As argued by Carnap (1950), in science and philosophy, "explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one or, rather, in replacing the first by the second. We call the given concept (or the term used for it) the explicandum, and the exact concept proposed to take the place of the first (or the term proposed for it) the explicatum. The explicandum may belong to everyday language or to a previous stage in the development of scientific language. The explicatum must be given by explicit rules for its use, for example, by a definition which incorporates it into a well-constructed system of scientific either logicomathematical or empirical concepts."
In this context, "explication" is now regarded as "an appropriate methodology for formal philosophy". (Maher, 2007).
By contrast, in literary criticism, the term "explication" is used as a proxy for the term explication de texte (proposed by Gustave Lanson), where additional understandings and meanings are derived from the "close reading" of (say) a poem, novel or play.
In this process, explication often involves a line-by-line or episode-by-episode commentary on what is going on in a text. While initially this might seem reasonably innocuous, explication de texte, and explication per se, is an interpretative process where the resulting new knowledge, new insights or new meanings, are open to subsequent debate and disaffirmation by others.
Notes
[edit]- ^ Österblom, Fredrik (2025). Broadening explication: an interpretation and development of Carnap's method of explication (PDF). Lund: Department of Philosophy, Lund University. ISBN 978-91-90055-10-6.
- ^ "Definition of EXPLICATION". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 2021-01-21.
- ^ a b c Murphy, M. Lynne (2010). Lexical Meaning. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. pp. 69–73.
References
[edit]- Bonolio, G. (2003). "Kant's Explication and Carnap’s Explication: The Redde Rationem", International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 3, Issue 171, pp. 289–298.
- Carnap, R. (1950). Logical foundations of probability, University of Chicago Press, Illinois.
- Harrison, S. E. (2006). "Explication without words: A composer's view", Organisations and People, August, Vol. 13 (3), pp. 59–63. ISSN 1350-6269
- Introducing explication. Online since April 2013.
- Maher, P. (2007) "Explication defended", Studia Logica, Volume 86, Number 2, July 2007, pp. 331–341.
External links
[edit]- Explication article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- The Close Reading of Poetry: A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication Archived 2013-04-06 at the Wayback Machine
Explication
View on Grokipediafrom Grokipedia
Explication is the act of explaining or interpreting something by unfolding its meaning, derived from the Latin explicare ("to unfold"). In academic contexts, it refers to methodical clarification of concepts, texts, or phenomena across various domains, including philosophy, linguistics, and literature.[1]
In literature, explication is a method of criticism involving detailed, line-by-line examination of a text's formal elements—such as language, structure, imagery, rhetoric, and stylistic devices—to reveal implicit meanings and how the author conveys them.[2] Rooted in the French educational tradition of explication de texte, it emerged in early 20th-century France as a pedagogical tool for close analysis of literary works, prioritizing intrinsic textual qualities over external historical or biographical contexts. In Anglo-American literary studies, explication aligned with the close reading practices of New Criticism, a formalist movement prominent from the 1930s to the 1950s that treated the text as an autonomous artifact.[3]
This approach emphasizes precise analysis of elements like plot, characters, grammar, sound patterns, themes, and the interplay of form and content, typically resulting in an essay that paraphrases and interprets the text's layers. Central to explication is its objective, evidence-based exploration of the work's unity and complexity—encompassing tension, ambiguity, paradox, and irony—to assess artistic merit, independent of subjective reader responses. While primarily applied to poetry and prose, the method's formalism has been critiqued for neglecting broader cultural, historical, and ideological contexts.[3]
Sometimes a person thinks like this:
something very good is happening to me now
I want this to happen again
Because of this, this person feels something very good.[30] This script captures the prototypical scenario of happiness through linked components involving causation, evaluation, and desire, avoiding circularity by building solely from primes. Such explications highlight subtle cultural nuances when compared across languages, as in the contrast between English "happy" and Russian "vesel" (cheerful), which emphasizes shared activity over personal fortune.[31] The methodology of NSM is inductive and evidence-based, proceeding from systematic analysis of semantic intuitions elicited from native speakers across dozens of languages to propose and test candidate primes and explications. Unlike deductive formal logics, it prioritizes "folk semantics"—the everyday conceptual reality reflected in ordinary language use—validating universality through typological comparisons rather than innate assumptions. This process involves iterative refinement: initial hypotheses are checked against translation equivalents, collocations, and contextual co-occurrences in corpora, ensuring explications are non-arbitrary and verifiable. NSM has been applied extensively in lexicography to create culturally sensitive dictionary entries and in cultural analysis to unpack values like "honor" or "freedom" in ethnopragmatic studies, revealing how language encodes societal norms.[32]
Definition and General Usage
Etymology and Core Meaning
The term "explication" derives from the Latin explicatio, the noun form of explicatus, past participle of explicare, meaning "to unfold," "to unroll," or "to explain," combining the prefix ex- ("out") with plicare ("to fold").[4] This root evokes the idea of disentangling or spreading out something folded or concealed, reflecting an act of making implicit elements explicit.[5] The word entered Middle French as explication around the 14th century, before being borrowed into English in the early 16th century (first known use in 1531), where it initially retained connotations of unfolding or developing complex ideas.[6] In contemporary English, the verb "explicate" means to develop or explain something in detail, particularly by analyzing its implications or clarifying what is obscure or implicit.[4] The noun "explication," correspondingly, denotes the act of such explanation or the resulting detailed interpretation, often applied to ideas, texts, or phenomena requiring clarification. For instance, dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary describe it as "a very detailed explanation of an idea or a work of literature," emphasizing its role in exposition.[7] Similarly, the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as "the act of explaining something in detail, especially a piece of writing or an idea." Explication thus distinguishes between the process—clarifying vagueness through logical unfolding—and the outcome—a clear, explicit statement that resolves ambiguities.[4] This dual aspect underscores its foundational use across domains, including a brief reference in analytic philosophy to refining imprecise concepts into precise ones.[8]Broad Applications in Knowledge Domains
Explication serves as a foundational tool for achieving conceptual clarity across diverse knowledge domains, enabling the transformation of ambiguous or inexact ideas into precise formulations that facilitate analysis and application. In philosophy, it functions primarily as a method for sharpening concepts by replacing vague, everyday notions with rigorous, scientifically useful equivalents, a process that underscores its role in rational reconstruction and logical analysis.[9] In linguistics, explication involves the decomposition of word meanings into simpler, universal components, allowing for cross-linguistic comparisons and the avoidance of ethnocentric biases in semantic studies.[10] Within literary criticism, it manifests as a meticulous unfolding of textual elements, including structure, imagery, and tone, to reveal how a work conveys its significance without imposing external interpretations.[11] Emerging applications in artificial intelligence extend this tradition to explainable AI (XAI), where explication-inspired metrics evaluate the adequacy of explanations for opaque models, ensuring transparency in decision-making processes.[12] By the 20th century, this method gained formalization within logical positivism, as philosophers like Rudolf Carnap adapted it to address the need for precise concepts in empirical sciences, marking a shift from rhetorical elaboration to systematic conceptual refinement.[13]Philosophical Explication
Rudolf Carnap's Original Framework
Rudolf Carnap introduced the concept of explication as a methodological tool within logical empiricism to refine vague, everyday concepts for use in scientific inquiry. The core of this framework involves identifying an explicandum, which is an inexact or prescientific notion, and replacing it with an explicatum, a precise and exact concept that serves as its scientific counterpart.[9] For instance, the everyday term "fish" serves as an explicandum, encompassing a broad and somewhat fuzzy category that historically included creatures like whales; Carnap proposed "piscis" as the explicatum, defined biologically as a vertebrate breathing through gills and lacking limbs, thereby excluding mammals like whales to align with empirical classification.[13] This replacement is not mere clarification but a deliberate substitution designed to enhance conceptual precision without losing essential connections to the original idea.[14] Carnap developed this framework during the 1940s and 1950s, building on his earlier logical positivist commitments. He first outlined explication in his 1945 paper "The Two Concepts of Probability," but elaborated it significantly in Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (1947), where it addressed issues in semantic analysis and the construction of formal languages.[13] The most detailed exposition appears in the opening chapter of Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), positioning explication as essential for advancing inductive logic and probability theory by transforming informal notions into rigorous tools for empirical science.[9] Unlike traditional analysis, which seeks to unpack existing meanings, Carnap's approach treats explication as a creative replacement, allowing philosophers to stipulate new concepts that better suit scientific frameworks.[15] The primary purpose of explication in Carnap's framework is to propel inexact, prescientific ideas toward exactness, thereby facilitating progress in empirical disciplines. By emphasizing improvements in similarity (fidelity to the explicandum's intended use), simplicity (elegance in formulation), and fruitfulness (applicability to broader scientific problems), explication enables the construction of more effective theoretical structures.[13] This method reflects Carnap's broader aim within logical empiricism to bridge ordinary language with the formal rigor of science, ensuring that concepts evolve to support verifiable knowledge rather than remaining mired in ambiguity.[9]Criteria and Methodological Process
Carnap outlined four principal criteria to evaluate the adequacy of an explication, ensuring that the proposed explicatum effectively replaces the explicandum while advancing scientific precision.[16] These criteria are: similarity, simplicity, fruitfulness, and exactness.[16] Similarity requires that the explicatum resemble the explicandum sufficiently to serve as a substitute in the majority of contexts where the original concept was applied, preserving its intuitive core.[16] For instance, an explication of "truth" might employ Tarski's T-schema, where a sentence 'P' is true if and only if P, maintaining alignment with everyday truth attributions while formalizing them semantically.[16] Simplicity demands that the explicatum be formulated with minimal complexity, favoring economical definitions that avoid unnecessary elaboration without sacrificing fidelity.[16] Fruitfulness emphasizes the explicatum's capacity to facilitate the development of general laws and theoretical advancements, thereby enhancing its utility within broader scientific frameworks.[16] Exactness insists on unambiguous rules for application, eliminating vagueness through precise definitions that integrate seamlessly into formal systems.[16] In practice, these criteria are applied iteratively to refine explications; for example, Carnap's treatment of "probability" as a logical probability function, such as the degree of confirmation c(h,e) measuring evidential support for hypothesis h given evidence e, satisfies exactness via explicit logical rules while demonstrating fruitfulness in inductive reasoning.[16] The methodological process for conducting an explication follows a structured sequence to ensure rigor. First, the explicandum is identified and clarified through contextual examples, delineating its prescientific usage without premature formalization.[16] Second, candidate explicata are proposed, typically as exact concepts within a defined logical or mathematical framework.[16] Third, each proposal is tested against the four criteria, assessing its overall satisfactoriness rather than seeking an absolute "correct" replacement, given the explicandum's inherent ambiguity.[16] Finally, iterations occur through revision and re-evaluation, incorporating feedback from theoretical applications or intuitive judgments until the explicatum achieves balance across the criteria.[16] This process underscores explication as a pragmatic tool for conceptual clarification in philosophy and science.[16]Relation to Truth and Verification
In Rudolf Carnap's framework, explication functions as a stipulative proposal rather than an assertoric hypothesis, meaning it does not purport to describe or assert factual truths about the world but instead introduces precise concepts by convention for analytical purposes.[17] Unlike descriptive definitions, which aim to capture the actual meaning or truth conditions of terms and are thus subject to empirical or logical verification for accuracy, explications are evaluated solely on their pragmatic utility, such as clarity, simplicity, and fruitfulness in advancing scientific discourse.[18] This non-truth-apt status allows explications to serve as tools for conceptual engineering without risking falsification, emphasizing their role in refining language to eliminate vagueness rather than testing ontological claims.[19] This approach ties directly to the verification principle central to logical positivism, where meaningful statements must be empirically verifiable or analytically true; Carnap extended this by requiring that explicata— the precise substitutes for vague explicanda—be formulated in verifiable terms, either through empirical observation or logical analysis.[20] For instance, in refining everyday concepts like "cause" into scientifically precise notions, explication avoids metaphysical entanglements by ensuring the resulting explicatum aligns with positivist criteria of testability, thereby supporting the elimination of unverifiable pseudoproblems in philosophy.[21] By prioritizing verifiability, explication aids the positivist goal of demarcating science from metaphysics, transforming ambiguous terms into ones amenable to confirmation rather than strict verification.[22] Historically, this conception emerged from Carnap's involvement with the Vienna Circle, where logical positivists sought to ground knowledge in verifiable experience, and explication provided a method to reconstruct scientific language without external commitments.[17] Influenced by Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth, Carnap developed an "explication of truth" through formal semantics, defining truth as a property of sentences within a language system—L-truth based on semantic rules—while eschewing ontological questions about reality's structure.[19] This semantic approach enables the analysis of truth predicates without assuming the existence of abstract entities, aligning with positivism's anti-metaphysical stance and allowing truth to be treated as a linguistic construct verifiable within chosen frameworks.[22]Critiques and Later Developments
One of the most influential critiques of Carnap's framework for explication came from W.V.O. Quine in the 1950s, who argued in his seminal essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) that the analytic-synthetic distinction—central to Carnap's method of clarifying concepts through precise explicata—is untenable, as attempts to define analyticity inevitably lead to circularity and fail to demarcate a sharp boundary between empirical and logical truths.[23] This challenge undermined the foundational assumption of explication as a tool for rational reconstruction, suggesting that concepts cannot be isolated and refined without entanglement in holistic empirical webs.[24] Practical challenges to achieving the exactness Carnap envisioned have also persisted, particularly regarding the handling of vagueness in everyday concepts. This persistence of vagueness raises questions about whether explication truly advances understanding or merely displaces ambiguity into technical jargon. Post-Carnap developments extended explication's influence into formal semantics, where Saul Kripke's 1980 work Naming and Necessity adapted similar reconstructive techniques to analyze reference and necessity, treating proper names as rigid designators within possible-world frameworks rather than as abbreviated descriptions, thereby refining Carnapian clarity for modal logic.[25] In modern analytic philosophy, David Chalmers in the 2010s revived elements of explication through the Canberra Plan, a method of conceptual analysis that uses Ramsey-Carnap-style sentences to bridge folk concepts with scientific theories, as seen in his advocacy for two-dimensional semantics to explicate phenomena like consciousness.[26] In contemporary philosophy since the 2020s, Carnap's method of explication has been central to "conceptual engineering," an approach to refining concepts for philosophical progress.[13] Defenses of explication's utility have countered these critiques by emphasizing its pragmatic value. Peter Maher, in his 2007 paper "Explication Defended," argued that even if explication alters the original concept, it successfully addresses philosophical problems by providing workable substitutes, responding directly to Peter Strawson's earlier objection that it evades rather than resolves issues.[27] Interdisciplinarily, Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic critique in Truth and Method (1960, with ongoing influence) challenged the positivist clarity underlying Carnap's approach, viewing explication as overly reductive and dismissive of historical prejudice and dialogic understanding in favor of abstract precision.[28] This tension highlights gaps in purely logical reconstructions, linking explication to broader debates in hermeneutics where meaning emerges from contextual fusion rather than isolated formalization.Semantic and Linguistic Explication
Principles in Natural Semantic Metalanguage
In semantic explication within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, word meanings are decomposed into configurations of universal semantic primes to reveal underlying conceptual structures shared across languages. This approach treats explication as a tool for clarifying folk understandings of concepts through reductive paraphrases, emphasizing empirical linguistic evidence over abstract theorizing. The NSM theory originated as a research program initiated by linguist Anna Wierzbicka in the 1960s, with formal development beginning in the early 1970s through her work at the University of Warsaw and the Australian National University. Wierzbicka identified a small set of indefinable semantic elements as the foundation for meaning representation, publishing key early formulations in her 1972 book Semantic Primitives. Cliff Goddard joined the effort in the 1980s at Griffith University, co-authoring numerous studies that refined and expanded the framework, including collaborative texts that solidified NSM as a systematic method for cross-linguistic semantics. At its core, NSM explication relies on an inventory of approximately 65 semantic primes—simple, universal concepts like I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, WANT, KNOW, THINK, FEEL, GOOD, and BAD—which cannot be further reduced and are lexically or grammatically expressed in all languages.[29] These primes, along with a natural syntax of about 12 combinatory rules, form the metalanguage for constructing explications that approximate the intuitive meanings speakers associate with words. For instance, the English concept of "happy" (as a feeling) can be explicated as follows: X feels something good.Sometimes a person thinks like this:
something very good is happening to me now
I want this to happen again
Because of this, this person feels something very good.[30] This script captures the prototypical scenario of happiness through linked components involving causation, evaluation, and desire, avoiding circularity by building solely from primes. Such explications highlight subtle cultural nuances when compared across languages, as in the contrast between English "happy" and Russian "vesel" (cheerful), which emphasizes shared activity over personal fortune.[31] The methodology of NSM is inductive and evidence-based, proceeding from systematic analysis of semantic intuitions elicited from native speakers across dozens of languages to propose and test candidate primes and explications. Unlike deductive formal logics, it prioritizes "folk semantics"—the everyday conceptual reality reflected in ordinary language use—validating universality through typological comparisons rather than innate assumptions. This process involves iterative refinement: initial hypotheses are checked against translation equivalents, collocations, and contextual co-occurrences in corpora, ensuring explications are non-arbitrary and verifiable. NSM has been applied extensively in lexicography to create culturally sensitive dictionary entries and in cultural analysis to unpack values like "honor" or "freedom" in ethnopragmatic studies, revealing how language encodes societal norms.[32]