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We Need Non-factive Metaphysical Explanation

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Abstract

Suppose that A explains B. Do A and B need to be true? Provided that we have metaphysical explanation in mind, orthodoxy answers “yes:” metaphysical explanation is factive. This article introduces and defends a non-factive notion of metaphysical explanation. I argue that we need a non-factive notion of explanation in order to make sense of explanationist arguments where we motivate a view by claiming that it offers better explanations than its competitors. After presenting and rejecting some initially plausible rivals, I account for non-factive metaphysical explanation by drawing on existing applications of structural equation models to metaphysical grounding.

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Notes

  1. Though occasionally explicit (Fine 2012; Schaffer 2016), this commitment is more often implicit. For example, grounding is widely claimed to relate facts or to operate on sentences, where the result is true only if its component sentences are. Grounding is then claimed to underwrite or be identical with metaphysical explanations sharing their relata (c.f. Rosen 2010).

  2. Audi 2012b offers a longer list of canonical examples. Some metaphysical explanations may not be determinative or underwritten by grounding. See Bertrand 2018; Taylor 2018.

  3. This disjunction divides unionism from separatism (Raven 2015). Both disjuncts are denied by opponents of Explanatory Realism (see Thompson 2016; Kovacs 2017; Taylor 2018).

  4. While I assume separatism, unionism also features determinative relations that back explanation: e.g. composition or property realization. Jessica Wilson (2014) bases her skeptical challenge to grounding on this. Determinative relations are factive. And that’s all my argument needs.

  5. This recalls Lewis’s 1983 argument against David Armstrong but isn’t intended as a faithful representation. Lewis’ argument is a more complex example of my target.

  6. I leave open why we should prefer the best explanation. Perhaps explanatoriness is the mark of truth. But Rose may instead endorse the weaker claim that explanatoriness is a theoretical virtue. Other things equal, we should accept the most virtuous theory.

  7. This case shares its relevant features with more complex cases where explanations compete but doesn’t require judgments of explanatory goodness.

  8. Though Fine’s considered view is that the factive notion is more fundamental. See Fine 2012, p. 50.

  9. Subjunctive conditionals may have true antecedents (Lewis 1973, p. 3).

  10. This is tacitly assumed in the metaphysics of properties, though Miller 2010 disputes it. Theories of properties are accounts of their nature and things have their natures necessarily. .

  11. Impossibility weighs heavily against similarity (Nolan 1997, p. 550).

  12. Similarly, a strategy built on the material conditional fails: <A> N-explains <B> iff, If <A> and <B> then [A] F-explains [B]. Since by the lights of one party the embedded conditional will have a (necessarily) false antecedent, the conditional is trivially true. The explanation can be co-opted by any view on which <A> is necessarily false.

  13. Unless counterpossibles are trivially true. If so, the Revised Conditional Strategy entails that any necessarily false theory offers every possible N-explanation.

  14. Some metaphysical determinative relations are same-making rather than difference-making and aren’t well represented by structural equation models. See Koslicki 2016, pp. 106–109; J. Wilson 2016, pp. 189–191.

  15. This amounts to defining a model and intervening on it. See Woodward 2003. For an explicit procedure concerning grounding see Schaffer 2016.

  16. Without broad agreement concerning how explanation works, it’s difficult to see how explanationist arguments have purchase.

  17. For this reason, we need not allow A to explain itself in the case that troubled the Subtractive Strategy. However, none of these claims are wholly uncontroversial. See Jenkins 2011 on irreflexivity, Schaffer 2012 on transitivity, and Barnes (2018) on asymmetry.

  18. Why doesn’t the problem for non-factive explanatory claims also emerge for non-factive grounding claims? It may. But I don’t face it here. I require consistency with the world’s determinative structure as it is taken to be by the explanans and its background. This concerns the determinative commitments of a theory and not the world’s determinative structure.

  19. If we don’t have qualms about abstracta then there’s an apt witnessing model because the world has among its constituents the abstract object that is the model. Those with qualms need a suitable nominalism.

  20. I assume there’s some enumeration scheme mapping determinate shades to unique real numbers.

  21. The debate needn’t unfold this way. My claim is that the existence of an apt witnessing model makes Rose’s explanatory claim true.

  22. Rose and Neil might both have had genuine N-explanations. The debate would then turn on whose N-explanation is better. One N-explanation is better than another if the explanation represented by its apt witnessing model is more virtuous than its competitor. Determining how explanatory virtue works is beyond the scope of this paper. But it’s on this point that we should decide explanationist arguments.

    .

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rob Smithson, Finnur Dellsen, Tyler Hildebrand, Luke Manning, Antonio Capuano, Nic Koziolek, Tim Sundell, audiences at Auburn University, the University of South Alabama, and the University of Florida. Special thanks to several excellent referees at Erkenntnis.

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    Michael Bertrand

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Bertrand, M. We Need Non-factive Metaphysical Explanation. Erkenn 87, 991–1011 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00227-2

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