Abstract

My dissertation investigates the semantic contribution of the individual words ‘why’ and ‘because', attempting to get clear on whether and how some of our central explanatory terminology gets disambiguated, and thereby to make some progress on a theory of ‘why’-questions that can tell us something substantive about explanation. I argue that ‘why’ and ‘because’ have literal causal senses, as well as distinct senses that we use to communicate metaphysical explanations. I show that apparent further semantic variations in the meaning of ‘because’ in its so-called epistemic and metalinguistic uses are illusory, and give a full explanation of those variations in terms of syntactic ambiguities. Finally, I argue that a causal metaphor unifies the senses of 'why' and 'because' at issue in metaphysical explanations with their literal causal senses. What this semantic investigation turns out to offer us, I argue, is a new understanding of the centrality of causal explanation to explanation in general.