Paper short abstract:

The human mind explains the world, but it also produces the multiple mental representations of time flow. As result explanandum and explanans can be represented in the different time flows. This raises the problem of variability of explanations and that of reliability of the explanation theories.

Paper long abstract:

The world being explained and understood provides feelings of confidence and security. Through the human history the explanations arise independently of whether a conventionally accepted explanation is right or wrong. This was true for the minds of our ancestors and most probably it will remain true for the minds of our descendants. This is why the human mind generates explanations ubiquitously in both a spontaneous and conscious way. At the same time human mind is able to produce the multiple mental representations of time flow (Polunin, 2015, 2016, 2021). The paper discusses variability and reliability of explanatory outcome made in the space of the multiple mental representations of time flow. Introducing the notion of the multiple mental representations of time we rely on the experimental studies in psychology and empirical findings from cultural studies. So, instead of the conventional singular time flow one faces an array of the mental representations of time flow. As result all, person producing explanation, explanandum and explanans, can be represented in different time flows. Thus all of them show variability in their cognitive representations over time. This points to the dependence of explanandum and explanans from an actual representation of time flow. Therefore, the multiplicity of cognitive representations of time flow leads to variable temporal representation of explanation relata, and so to divergence of explanation outcomes. This raises the problem of reliability of the explanation theories when their components are mapped upon the space of the multiple mental representations of time flow.