The humanistic disciplines aim to offer explanations of a wide variety of phenomena. Philosophical theories of explanation have focused mostly on explanations in the natural sciences; a much discussed theory of explanation is the causal theory of explanation. Recently it has come to be recognized that the sciences sometimes offer respectable explanations that are non-causal. This paper broadens the discussion by discussing explanations that are offered in the fields of history, linguistics, literary theory, and archaeology that do not seem to fit the causal theory of explanation. We conducted an exploratory survey in acclaimed humanities textbooks to find explicitly so-called explanations and analyze their nature. The survey suggests that non-causal explanations are an integral part of the humanities and that they are of distinct kinds. This paper describes three kinds that are suggested by our survey: teleological, formal, and normative explanations. We suggest that such humanistic explanations strengthen the case for explanatory pluralism.

人文学科旨在为各种现象提供解释。哲学解释理论主要集中于自然科学的解释。一个被广泛讨论的解释理论是因果解释理论。最近人们逐渐认识到，科学有时会提供非因果性的值得尊敬的解释。本文通过讨论历史、语言学、文学理论和考古学领域提供的似乎不符合因果解释理论的解释来扩大讨论。我们对著名的人文教科书进行了探索性调查，以找到明确的所谓解释并分析其本质。调查表明，非因果解释是人文学科的一个组成部分，并且它们具有不同的类型。本文描述了我们的调查所建议的三种解释：目的论解释、形式解释和规范解释。我们认为，这种人文主义解释强化了解释性多元化的理由。