University:
Boston University
Course:
SSW ET 753 | Ethics and the Social Work Profession
Academic year:

2024
Views:

255

Pages:

19
Author:

fluindilatxld

Examples of surprise 1. Surprising. Rolling 100 consecutive sixes. This meets the two criteria for surprise. An alternative set of circumstances is that the die is biased. 2. Unsurprising. Rolling some particular 'generic' sequence of 100 numbers between 1 and 6. Whilst this meets the first criterion (since the sequence has the same probability as the last one), there is no obvious alternative set of circumstances, relative to which the probability of the event would be higher, which isn't itself vastly improbable. Horwich (ibid. p.103) considers a person who wins a lottery consisting of one billion entrants versus a person who wins three lotteries, each consisting of one thousand entrants. Taken against the background assumption that the lotteries are fair, the first event is not surprising, while the second is. This is because there is an alternative hypothesis (that the person cheats in some way) which would make the event likely, and Horwich's inequality comes out in favour of the cheating hypothesis in the second case, but not in the first. A pragmatic theory of explanation Explanation has occurred when the requisite revision has been made to auxiliary assumptions held by the explainee, reducing the surprise which motivated the explanatory demand. Explanation therefore consists of the revision to background assumptions in order to accommodate surprising facts, i.e. explanations convert surprising facts into unsurprising facts by modifying auxiliary assumptions. Explanation as a perlocutionary act: to explain something is to do something From “what are explanations” to “what do explanations do?” Yet … Explanations do not merely describe; they can be speech acts i.e. they have a performative function. … an explanans which does not explain is not an explanation. This is adjudicated by the person to whom the explanation is offered. In making explananda more expectable, they reconfigure the background assumptions of the explainee, and they make the explanandum unsurprising. The process of explanation is dialectical, and the explainee has a certain power over the explanatory process and its results, and a responsibility for it. This power can be subverted in order to meet the responsibility.    

Misunderstanding as a Method of Resistance - Examples of Surprise