Abstract
The unificationist theory of causal explanation offers a theory of causation and explanation with no causal primitives. Kitcher proposed that it offered an account of explanatory asymmetry, but his proposal has been criticized for being too dependent on contingent facts and surreptitiously supposing causal realism. In addition, critics have argued that unificationism cannot account for asymmetry in a world with symmetric laws of physics (such as ours) and is lead to accept backwards explanation in certain epistemic situations. Unificationism has been defended from some of these objections. We critique those defenses, rejecting some and developing others, as well as adding new ones. In doing so, we argue that objectors are wrong to treat explanatory asymmetry as an a priori matter and that unificationism is appropriately sensitive to the right sort of empirical facts.
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Notes
The other major problem was that they allowed explanations that were irrelevant. We shall not deal with that problem in this paper.
This issue was put to us by an anonymous reviewer.
Barnes also offers the example of deducing the presence of a stroller from a footprint on a beach. We think that this example is analogous to the fossil example, in every crucial respect. Accordingly, we omitted discussion of the example to reduce the length of this paper.
This issue was raised by the same anonymous reviewer.
Thanks to David Glick for helping to simplify this example.
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Sansom, R., Shields, J. Asymmetry in the unificationist theory of causal explanation. Synthese 195, 765–783 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1241-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1241-7