These are three different modes of interacting with a text, idea, concept, or process. You can explain the process, describe the process, or demonstrate the process. It doesn't matter which are used. One is not "better" than the other. Westerners seem to privilege explanation over other forms of communication. That's not important here. What we want to do is establish working definitions of demonstration, explanation, and description.
Let's start with explanation. What is an explanation? Within an explanation, there is an explainer and a concept or process. The explainer explains the process. To do so, the explainer must detach himself from the process, crystalize the information, and then translate it into something that is easier to understand. An explanation is a process.
What is a description? The function of a description is not to communicate a process but rather, to communicate the subjective experience of the process. A describer describes their experience of a concept.
Finally, demonstration. A demonstrator demonstrates a process. Unlike the describer and the explainer, the demonstrator is not separate from the process. He is the process unfolding in real-time.
It's important to understand that while we don't say that demonstration is better than explanation or anything of the sort, we do make a distinction between the quality of one demonstration and the other. In other words, we're not naively placing all things at equal footing. Rather, we see no valid reason to say that explanations are better than demonstrations. Descriptions may be less useful for educational purposes, and more useful for immersive fictional experiences.
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