Abstract
There are many putative counterexamples to the view that all scientific explanations are causal explanations. Using a new theory of what it is to be a causal explanation, Bradford Skow has recently argued that several of the putative counterexamples fail to be non-causal. This paper defends some of the counterexamples by showing how Skow’s argument relies on an overly permissive theory of causal explanations.
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Notes
Skow says that in-virtue-of explanations explain why some facts obtain by appealing to “deeper” facts that ground them. To illustrate, Skow notes that a scientist may explain why a piece of glass is fragile by citing its molecular structure. Such an explanation would be an in-virtue-of explanation, since the molecular structure grounds its fragility (Skow 2014, 446–447). Since I will not be discussing in-virtue-of explanations in what follows, I will for convenience use “explanation” in a restricted sense as referring only to explanations that are not in-virtue-of explanations (although see footnote 6).
As Skow indicates, the first part of this theory is very similar, if not identical, to that proposed by Lewis (1986). Thus Skow’s theory is even more permissive than Lewis’s already quite permissive theory of causal explanations. That said, my argument against Skow (presented in Sect. 3) is not only that the addition of the second part of the theory makes it too permissive, but that the first part is already too permissive (because it counts obvious non-explanations as partial causal explanations). So if my argument succeeds against Skow’s theory, it also succeeds against Lewis’s.
One might wonder about the kind of possibility at play in Skow’s view: need a partial causal explanation rule our causal histories that are physically possible or is it enough for them to rule out causal histories that are metaphysically, epistemically, or even just logically possible? Although Skow does not address this question explicitly, it is clear from his response to Nerlich’s example that ruling out physically possible causal histories is not required. After all, worlds in which free particles do not travel on straightest lines are physically impossible, so ruling out causal histories in which that happens is not to rule out physically possible causal histories. Thus we see that the kind of possibility in play must be metaphysical, epistemic, or logical possibility.
To be clear, I am not defending MTCE here as an adequate account of partially causal explanations. Indeed, in my view MTCE is still overly permissive since it counts information that specifies any part of some event’s causal history as a partial causal explanation of that event. So, if the Big Bang is a part of all actual causal histories, then the fact that the Big Bang happened counts as a partial causal explanation of all actual events. Also, depending on one’s intuitions and how one individuates events, MTSC might also be too restrictive. To see this, consider the following case (suggested to me by Brad Skow in personal communication): suppose Jones has a black eye because Smith punched him in the face. It might be thought that the information that someone punched Jones in the face suffices to partially causally explain Jones’s black eye, and yet being punched by someone in the face arguably does not specify any particular cause of the black eye. (It does not specify whether the puncher was Smith, or Brown, or someone else.) However, if one wanted to defend MTCE, one could point out that the information that Jones was punched in the face by someone does specify that the causal history of Jones’s black eye included a punch. If one adopts criteria for individuation of events such that punching counts as a distinct event (over and above Smith’s punching, Brown’s punching, etc.) this would count as partially causally explanatory on MTCE.
It should be noted that this theory does conflict with an example that Skow takes to be of a partial causal explanation. Skow (2014, 448) says that the fact that Huey did not throw the rock at the window partially causally explains why the window broke since it rules out one particular cause of the window breaking and narrows down the list of possible causes to Dewey and Louie (who were the only other people around who might have thrown a rock at it). On MTCE, this is false since the information that Huey did not throw the rock does not specify any event or sequence of events in the causal history of the breaking of the window.
Although I am not defending MTCE here (see previous footnote), it does seem to me that MTCE gets this case right (and that Skow’s original theory, STCE, gets it quite wrong). I cannot imagine a situation in which the piece of information that Huey did not break the window would even partially satisfy someone’s request for a causal explanation of the fact that the window broke. (Of course, someone who is interested only in what Huey did—e.g. his parents—might be satisfied with this information, but such a person is not requesting an explanation of the fact that the window broke.) That said, I acknowledge that Huey throwing the rock at the window provides some information about what the partial causal explanation might be—thus we could say that it is causal-explanatory information relevant to the window breaking. But this is also true of the “explanans” in the barometer example, and so that cannot make Huey’s non-throw into a partial causal explanation.
An anonymous reviewer points out that given the background knowledge that Huey, Dewey or Louie broke the window, the proposition that Louie broke the window is equivalent to the conjunctive proposition that neither Huey nor Dewey broke the window. So suppose Louie broke the window. Since the proposition that Huey did not break the window is one conjunct in a conjunction that is equivalent (given background knowledge) to this proposition about the actual cause of the breaking of the window, the reviewer suggests that one might think that Huey not breaking the window is a partial causal explanation. In response, I deny the assumption that the fact that some proposition is a conjunct in a conjunction that is equivalent (given background knowledge) to a proposition about the cause of some event suffices for the proposition to be a partial causal explanation of the event (although it may provide information that is of causal-explanatory relevance to the event). In fact, to my mind the failure of this assumption is adequately illustrated by the Huey-Dewey-Louie example, since the information about Huey’s non-throw is intuitively not a partial causal explanation. For those who are not convinced by that case, here is another example: Suppose that victim V was murdered by suspect S. Given the background knowledge that the murder was a one-man job performed by a human being, this is equivalent to a proposition of the form “X1 did not murder V, and X2 did not murder V… and Xn did not murder V”, where {X1,…,Xn} is the set of all human beings except S at the time to the murder. However, the information that a random person did not murder V is surely not a partial causal explanation of V’s death.
In what follows, I will assume (as Skow himself does implicitly) that this is not an in-virtue-of explanation, i.e. an explanation in which the explanans grounds the explanandum. Admittedly, the notion of grounding is still being worked out in the metaphysics literature, so it is unclear what exactly will count as an in-virtue-of explanation. See, for example, Schaffer (2009), Rosen (2010) and Audi (2012). However, I have seen no suggestion in the literature that particular events may be grounded in the laws that govern them in the manner required for the event that the particle travels slower than light to be grounded in the law that nothing travels faster than (or at) the speed of light.
References
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Michael Bertrand, Marc Lange, Bradford Skow, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for helpful comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank those who participated in the reading group on non-causal explanations in the Spring of 2014 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for valuable discussions on these issues.
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Dellsén, F. There May Yet be Non-causal Explanations (of Particular Events). J Gen Philos Sci 47, 377–384 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-016-9333-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-016-9333-0