Speaking of explaining things....

[lizvogel]

I should have included this link in my last post: Patricia Wrede on necessary and sufficient causes. This is sort of the structural back-end to the visible front-end I was talking about yesterday. Because the reason the protagonist tries the final thing that ultimately works is that it's necessary to solve problem X -- but for that to work in a dramatic sense, there has to be a sufficiency of things pushing him in that direction, which includes all the other things he's tried that haven't worked.