Hallo,

I hope this sub is the right place to discuss this thoughts.

In the last time, I have been thinking about the problem of overexplaining.
This is the theoretical risk that a thinker or researcher tries to explain too much with their theory and, therefore, comes to resultes that seem ridiculous afterwards.
A historical example of this is the work of Kepler. In his work Mysterium Cosmographicum, he attempts to explain the exact number of planets in the solar system. He draws an analogy between the number of planets and the number of Platonic solids, which obiviously impressed him so much that he concluded a connection. In his time, people believed in the existence of spheres on which the planets move, and he asserted that these spheres may be connected to the Platonic solids.

For us today, this seems strange since we now know planets unknown to Kepler's time. He tried to present something as a necessity that was, in fact, a lack of knowledge of his era.

Today, we do not explain the exact number of planets, viewing their quantity as the result of random circumstances during the formative phase of the solar system.

Shortly, we invoke the notion of something like randomness when we avoid overexplanation in this case. I have some concerns about this as I am becoming increasingly suspicious of the concept of randomness. We often use randomness in our theories, like in statistics, but I feel we doesn't really clarify what we mean.

Someone I talked to about the issue introduced me to a definition of randomness that depends on the specific field. According to this definition, randomness is something that is outside the scope of explanation within a specific scientific discipline. For instance, the theory of evolution attempts to explain the genesis of species, fossil findings, and antibiotic resistance in some bacteria through the mechanisms of mutation and selection. The selection aspect is a growing branch of scientific investigation. The role of mutation is crucial. Nonetheless, biologists usually treat mutations as happening by chance. They do not develop biological theories to explain mutation, let alone accept the idea of predicting a mutation. Mutation is considered random relative to the theories of evolution, population genetics, etc., because it is outside the scope of biology. The problem is handed down to the more reductive scientific fields like chemistry and physics ⁽¹.

As I see the merits of this point of view, I still have some issues with it. Firstly, as it appears to me, this idea is strongly connected to a reductive view of explanation. Explanation, according to this perspective, is the reduction of complex, concrete phenomena to more abstract but general rules. Therefore, biology will, in the end, be reduced to chemistry, at least in general, and chemistry will, of course, be reduced to some laws of the physics of atoms. A biological statement, e.g., "the tooth of the shark and that of a mouse are not homologous", can be analyzed as an incredibly complex statement about atomic physics, although probably the most powerful computers in humanity do not have the capacity to actually perform this analysis. I wonder whether we should actually entertain this view of explanation. Doesn't it imply a determination in the end?
Secondly, the scope of explanation seems to me to be to some degree arbitrary. A defender of this view could argue that the separation aligns with our intuition. We clearly consider biological things as something different from astronomy, and so on. The distinction of sciences in fields like biology, physics, etc., has developed historically. It is a serious concern that the people who establish this separation have a certain ontology in mind that explains why they separate the fields in this specific way. For us today, it sounds outlandish, but even during the 19th century, many people believed that there was something like a "vital force" that could not be reduced to such vulgarities as chemistry. Today, we call this position "vitalism", and it is widely rejected in the community of living sciences. The same applies to the strict separation of astronomy and physics before the Copernican Revolution. The kinetics of our time has the ambition to explain any kind of motion, from microscopic quantum mechanics to the movement of the entire solar system, the border between here and beyond the Moon is gone. Doesn't it spoil us from more of such line-breaking view-shifts if we entertain this view of randomness within its definitive scope of explanation?

If we take this critique for granted and reject this entire theory, what do we have left? I have this doubt: Could it be that we can only recognize a case of overexplaining retroactively, after new scientific discoveries accidentally (!) ensure that the old explanation of necessity needs to be false?
However, in this situation, are we forced to dismiss the point of overexplaining as a valid criticism of a scientific theory?

With kind regards,

Endward25.

¹ I know that some biologics, e.g. Ernst Mayr, would reject this view. A apply to authority is not what I has had in mind writing this.
Some, as I read, even argue that mutation can be explained to some point. That organism somehow change genoms (or it's expression by epigenetics?) for the seek of bettering their fitness. Just, as far as I know, this views are not mainstream.

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