cultural epistemology

What passes as an explanation has a cultural dimension to it. This is true even for science. For example, before Newton, action-at-a-distance was perceived as magic. Then eventually people got used to it and started to accept it as a final explanation. This cultural adaptation took place despite the fact that Newton himself was very uncomfortable with the notion:

"It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it." (Source)