Abstract
John Watkins and I seem to be equally out of fashion in our shared views on explanation. There is no shame in this, since fashions change but the truth is forever. I, like him, cannot make such sense of the idea of probabilistic or statistical explanation. I do not share his rejection of inductive argument per se, but since I agree with him that “the occurrence at a particular time of a chance event simply defies all explanation”,1 I hold that no such non-deductive argument whose conclusion mentions a particular event could count as an explanation of that particular event, however highly probable, given the premises, that conclusion is.
Thanks to Mark Sainsbury, Peter Milne, and Graham Macdonald, this paper is somewhat less confused than it might have been.
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Notes
J.W.N. Watkins, Science and Scepticism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, U.S.A., 1984, p. 228.
A notable exception to this claim is Peter Achinstein, especially in his ‘The Object of Explanation’, in Explanation, S. Körner (Ed.), Blackwell, Oxford, 1975, pp. 1–45
in his The Nature of Explanation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983. I have learned more from Achinstein than from any other writer on explanation.
Jonathan Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology, Blackwell, Oxford, 1985, pp. 46–49.
Susan Haack, Philosophy of Logic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p. 246.
Zeno Vendler discusses the mixed case of facts and events as the relata of the causal relation. See Vendler, ‘Causal Relations’, The Journal of Philosophy, LXIV (21) (1967), 704–713.
David Lewis, ‘Causal Explanation’, Philosophical Papers, Vol. II, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, pp. 214–40.
James Woodward, ‘A Theory of Singular Causal Explanation’, Erkenntnis, 21 (1984), 231–262
‘Are Singular Causal Explanations Implicit Covering Law Explanations’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 16 (2) (June 1986), 253–279.
John Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 260.
Hilary Putnam discusses a case in which there is both a geometric ‘macroexplanation’ and a ‘microexplanation’ in terms of the laws of particle physics, for the fact that a peg 1 inch square goes through a 1 inch square hole and not through a 1 inch round hole, in his Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978, pp. 42–43.
Peter Achinstein, The Nature of Explanation, Chapters 2 and 3, passim.
Donald Davidson, The Journal of Philosophy, LXVI (21) (1967), 691–703
reprinted in Causation and Conditionals, Ernest Sosa (Ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 82–94. My page references are to the Sosa collection. Davidson actually holds that “the fact that — explains the fact that —” is a non-truth-functional sentential connective, but there is no need to enter into these refinements here.
Donald Davidson, ‘True to the Facts’, The Journal of Philosophy, LXVI (1969), 748–764.
J.L. Austin, ‘Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. XXIV, (1950)
reprinted in Truth, George Pitcher (Ed.), Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964, pp. 18–31. Quote from p. 24.
Zeno Vendler, op. cit., p. 710.
Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987.
See especially p. 51, Chapter 6 (pp. 139–78)
Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987 pp. 234–39.
Since writing this paper, I have had Barry Taylor’s ‘States of Affairs’ drawn to my attention (in Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Eds.), Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 263–284). For Taylor, facts are states of affairs which obtain. Taylor uses intensions as the predicative element he requires in constructing facts; whereas I use properties (for ordinary facts) and properties as conceptualised (for special or epistemicised facts). Clearly, there are similarities in our approaches. Taylor’s facts are useless for a theory of truth (see p. 280). Taylor mentions other possible uses for states of affairs (and facts), but he does not mention their employment in a theory of explanation.
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Ruben, DH. (1989). The Ontology of Explanation. In: D’Agostino, F., Jarvie, I.C. (eds) Freedom and Rationality. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 117. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2380-5_5
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