Understanding Physics: 'What?', 'Why?', and 'How?'

TL;DR

This paper explores three forms of scientific understanding—what, why, and how—emphasizing understanding-how through mechanistic explanations, and applies these concepts to thermodynamics and entropy case studies.

Contribution

It introduces a framework distinguishing understanding-what, understanding-why, and understanding-how, highlighting the depth of mechanistic explanations in scientific comprehension.

Findings

Understanding-how is a deeper form of understanding based on mechanistic explanations.

The framework clarifies different types of scientific understanding.

Application to thermodynamics illustrates the practical relevance of the distinctions.

Abstract

I want to combine two hitherto largely independent research projects, scientific understanding and mechanistic explanations. Understanding is not only achieved by answering why-questions, that is, by providing scientific explanations, but also by answering what-questions, that is, by providing what I call scientific descriptions. Based on this distinction, I develop three forms of understanding: understanding-what, understanding-why, and understanding-how. I argue that understanding-how is a particularly deep form of understanding, because it is based on mechanistic explanations, which answer why something happens in virtue of what it is made of. I apply the three forms of understanding to two case studies: first, to the historical development of thermodynamics and, second, to the differences between the Clausius and the Boltzmann entropy in explaining thermodynamic processes.