Wittgenstein is stated as having said "we must do away with the explanation and description alone must take its place" (PI 109).
But isn't this akin to the myth of the given that Sellars attacked?
Can a clear distinction really be made between providing a description and providing an explanation?
Doesn't the one effectively permeate the other?
One example that comes to mind that seems to leave the two interconnected is the description of a banana being thrown in the air.
We might describe the situation as Jim throwing the banana, or causing the banana to be thrown, into the air.
But here the description of the event, namely Jim hurling the banana into the air, is inclusive of two events, the event of Jim with a banana in his hand, and the event of the little banana hurling through the air (probably much to its dissatisfaction).
But, in this way, there is the occurrence of an explanation of an event within the mere 'description' of an event, the explanation being the induction of causality.
Indeed, so long as there is a certain ambiguity in what single 'event' we might be offering a description of and in what circumstances we offer a description of it, it seems to be the case that any given event can give way to be an explanation just as much as it can a description.
For example, when a detective asks 'what happened here?', you as a witness might give him the rundown on what happened. And yet, you are both describing what happened, insofar as you are recounting what happened, and offering an explanation, insofar as you are clarifying the situation for the person asking what happened. So there is a continuity in some cases between description and assertion, dependent on the context in which one states the occurrences of a given event.
As a last bit of inquiry, is Wittgenstein's criticisms of explanation (insofar as it is a criticism of 'private states of meaning' perverting what is simply observed of 'public behavior') similar in any way to Hume's criticism of induction?
Both seem to me to be criticizing a mental sort of behavior that impedes or contorts the naturalistic (or simply 'natural') experiences and observances made in our ordinary course of life.