Practice of research

Research is called the creation of explanations.

An explanation is a plausible description of a piece of the world, indicating the internal structure of cause-and-effect relationships. Regardless of whether we convey it or not, it must be created first.

If we recall the terms that have been introduced before and orient ourselves in them by providing examples of their use relative to each other, we get the following:

• Description is the broadest term, one can create descriptions of any level of formality, in any language, with almost no requirements for something to be considered a description. Someone creates them hoping that someone else will be able to read them.
• Models overlap with descriptions in that they refer to the objects they are associated with, but in a "model," physical objects are also included, sharing some properties with the modeled objects, and the main thing is that based on these properties, we can predict the behavior of the modeled object.
• Ontology is a formalized description of objects and relationships in an interesting part of the world, written in a way that a group of people can understand it.

An explanation or explanatory model is not just an ontology or a simple description but one in which special cause-and-effect relationships are highlighted.

Throughout the existence of human communities, the forms and standards of explanations have been very diverse, but largely driven by the same need: people are very uncomfortable when events hang in the air without explanation, the brain constantly attributes events on very fine scales as well as on larger scales.

This fundamental drive is associated with both very important abilities (such as building a coherent structure of the world) and very important errors (for example, the fundamental attribution error).

The feeling of chaos, unpredictability, and uncontrollability of the world is unpleasant, the feeling of understanding how something is structured and that this can be partially controlled is pleasant.

At some point, it was enough for everyone to explain phenomena magically, like something happening a certain way because the gods wanted it. However, these explanations have quality issues that affect the various scenarios in which they are used: this will be discussed below. As attempts were made to solve the quality issues of explanations, the methods of creating explanations evolved.

In addition to the explanations themselves and the methods of creating them, the individual creating the explanation is important.

They possess some qualifications and engage in a specific practice, therefore, they are very similar in type to a role.

The practice of creating explanations is related to research activities, and today its standard is set by the scientific approach, which it actually equals. What tasks does the creation of such explanations solve?