Abstract
The existence of causal explanations in science has been an issue of interest in Western philosophy from its very beginnings. That is the reason this work, following an idea of Mario Bunge, makes a historical review of this matter. The modern treatment of this subject takes place since the postulation by Popper and Hempel of the D-N model of scientific explanation, whose viability is scrutinized here from different points of view in the current philosophy of science. The main object of this paper is to present two arguments against the possibility of causal explanations in theoretical physics. The first one concerns the existence, in certain cases, of inter-theoretical incompatibilities, and the second refers to the need to resort, in other cases, to concatenations of laws of different theories and disciplines. The final conclusion will be the defence of a form of theoretical explanation, which follows the Popper-Hempel model, but devoid of any ontological and metaphysical connotations.
Complutense Research Group 930174 and Research Project FFI2014-52224-P supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government.
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- 1.
It is not my aim to make here an interpretation of the concept of causality in Plato. To that end, and without any claim of completeness, I refer to Ashbaugh (1988).
- 2.
This is the translation of Miguel Candel in the Spanish edition of the Organon (Aristóteles 1988, p. 412). In any case as Ross recognizes: “In history and in natural science we are attempting to explain events, and an event is to be explained (in Aristotle’s view) by reference either to an event that precedes it (an efficient cause) or to one that follows it (a final cause)” (Ross 1949, p. 79, Introduction).
- 3.
In this the current philosophy of science clearly disagrees with Aristotle. Hempel for instance claims that “To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question ‘why?’ rather than only the question ‘what?’ is one of the foremost objectives of empirical science” (Hempel 1965, p. 245). Lawrence Sklar considers that “To explain, we feel, is to answer the question why what occurs, and not just to describe what, in fact, does occur” (Sklar 1992, p. 100). And Peter Lipton argues that “The starting point of enquiry into explanation … is the gap between knowing that something is the case and understanding why it is” (Lipton 2001b, p. 103).
- 4.
According to Mach, science is an economy of thought, a clearly instrumentalist idea. He sums up this concept in the following terms: “The economy of thought, the economical representation of the actual, – this was indicated by me, in summary fashion first in 1871 and 1872, as being the essential task of science, and in 1882 and 1883 I gave considerably enlarged expositions of this idea. As I have shewn elsewhere, this conception,… can be traced back to Adam Smith, and, as P. Volkmann holds, in its beginnings even to Newton. We find the same conception again,…, fully developed in Avenarius (1876)” (Mach 1959, p. 49).
- 5.
Henceforth, French refers to the first edition of Duhem’s book.
- 6.
French means here the original edition of Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive.
- 7.
For instance, Popper says: “This concept of explanation (now commonly referred to as the ‘deductive-nomological concept of explanation’) is further elaborated in the Logik der Forschung (1934, 2nd ed., 1966), Sect. 12” (Popper 1979, p. 86, note *2. My own translation, A.R.).
- 8.
- 9.
This theory “consists in supposing the sun and his heat to have originated in a coalition of smaller bodies, falling together by mutual gravitation, and generating, as they must do according to the great law demonstrated by Joule, an exact equivalent of heat for the motion lost in collision” Kelvin (1903, pp. 493–4).
- 10.
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Rivadulla, A. (2019). Causal Explanations: Are They Possible in Physics?. In: Matthews, M.R. (eds) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_18
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