Abstract
Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes—and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples.
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Notes
- 1.
The distinction between explanations as communicative acts and explanations construed in an ‘ontic’ mode as sets of facts will not loom large in this paper; throughout, I will presume that the content of communicative acts are the explanatorily relevant facts.
- 2.
Though many explanations are strikingly sparse, others—among them some so-called ‘mechanistic’ accounts—are less so. Though both sorts will be dealt with in this paper, as both are recommended by the explanatory theory that I will articulate, I begin by emphasizing explanatory sparseness because it is comparatively puzzling and in need of philosophical elucidation.
- 3.
I am somewhat simplifying Mill’s discussion, in which he floats a number of more concrete proposals concerning causal selection, though in each case emphasizing their haphazard application.
- 4.
- 5.
Should this principle be considered as part of the semantics or the pragmatics of causal-explanatory claims? That is, in cases in which a particular factor that is usually back-grounded (e.g., oxygen with the fire) is (apparently illegitimately) claimed to be a or the cause of the event, does this involve saying something false (the semantic view) or saying something strictly true, but falling short in some other respect (inappropriate, uninformative, irrelevant, etc.)? I prefer a semantic approach, but don’t think the choice here makes any difference to the substance of my analysis; you should feel free to reconstruct the discussion on your preferred picture.
- 6.
I am glossing over numerous features of Woodward’s account: how these differences are affected, that is, via interventions; what the causal relata themselves are, that is, variables, etc. Though important in other contexts, rehearsing these features would be only a confusing distraction here.
- 7.
This embedding can be understood in one of two ways. On what appears to be Waters’ preferred formulation and which I do not follow, when properly understood the real explanandum in this case is not the red eyes in a particular fly, but instead a difference in eye color in a particular population. Put in just this way, Waters would not actually be addressing the causal selection problem, since that is the problem of accounting for why particular determinants are cited in explanations of events, not in explaining differences in types of events across populations. (Were his solution to that problem it would be completely un-controversial.) So that Waters can be addressing the causal selection problem itself, I am articulating a version of his strategy that maintains the same explanandum, but makes the causal-explanatory claim relative to a population.
- 8.
- 9.
Here I am following Strevens (2008).
- 10.
This is a term of art, and should not be assimilated to Lewis’ views in “Causation as Influence” (2000).
- 11.
Most transference accounts of the causal relation—such as Dowe’s process theory—are already physically constrained, so my requirement is, on them, without effect. It has the most impact on counterfactual accounts, such as on a causal interventionism of the Woodward (2003) variety. If causal influence is cashed out in interventionist terms, I insist that the causal model to which interventionist causal claims are relativized be a fine-grained physical model, not a ‘high-level’ one (even though those would otherwise be kosher) (Here I follow Strevens (2008)).
- 12.
For lack of space, I am equally unable to say much about the content of these causal laws, and will focus on characterizing the states of affairs are to be explanatorily cited. But in brief, the content of such laws is determined—not by some independent ‘high-level’ account of causation, such as that provided by Woodward (2003)—but by the explanatory selection procedure itself. The causal law connecting state of affairs A and target event B asserts that A is a winner of the causal economy competition with respect to B.
- 13.
Both amalgamation and populational transformation are species of what is sometimes called variable reduction. Variable reduction isn’t always considered a kind of abstraction, but I class it thus; it equally involves moving to a representation that leaves information out in contrast to the original.
- 14.
Though not important to my task here, the cost measure should also be relativized to the size of the causal-influential fabric for the event at the time of the candidate influence (e.g., the span of the event’s backwards light cone at the relevant time). After all, it is only as between properties of that material—one that gets rapidly larger earlier in time—that the selection principle must pick.
- 15.
This set of worlds is one that I describe exclusively to make sense of our explanatory practice. I take no stand here on whether it is in any way an objective set, one that is special from a metaphysical point-of-view. See my (forthcoming) for more on the privileged set of nearby possibly worlds, produced by a basic set of perturbations, that is used to define the stability boost.
- 16.
Crucially, this will not usually just reverse the initial perturbation that had the consequence of disrupting the influences cited in the explanans. Many consequences of that original perturbation will persist, despite the re-enactment, since the disruption of the explanans influences will usually be but one of many down-stream effects of the initial perturbation.
- 17.
Because the baseline stability of any target event is a constant, subtracting it will not change the ordinal ranking of candidate explanans. The subtraction is nevertheless useful by allowing us to conceptually distinguish target events with high baseline stability from those only stable with the aid of factors cited in the explanans.
- 18.
Predictably, it will be possible to contrive counterexamples to this gloss on my procedure, cases in which a baroque causal architecture thwarts my measure’s ability to isolate factors that do have this property. When considering such cases, it is important to keep the spirit of the Causal Economy proposal in mind: its selection principle aims to informatively describe the broad principles influencing our explanatory practices, practices that I believe to be best defined for the causal systems that scientists normally encounter and on which their norms have been trained. The most important task for an account is to deal with those systems; after all, it is challenging enough to provide an informative description—that is, one that doesn’t simply appeal to pervasive relativization—of principles guiding horizontal and vertical selection in those central cases.
- 19.
Fans of counterfactual difference-making accounts of causation may wonder about the nature of the base or contrast state relative to which difference-making is being implicitly evaluated. My algorithm, in effect, does not pick one ‘default,’ but instead surveys a large range of states, checks for difference-making relative to each of these states, and integrates over those results. In particular, big stability boosters are difference-makers relative to many or all of these alternative states, not just those present in the collection of worlds produced from our own via simple, physical perturbations at some prior time. This strikes me as better solution to the ‘default problem’ than privileging one such state, perhaps the one deemed (on subjective grounds) ‘normal.’
- 20.
Though my procedure does, I hope, give special preference to the unstable difference-makers, those that seem particularly explanatorily relevant, I do not deny that even stable difference-makers might, in some contexts, have an explanatory role. In particular, if we expand the set of nearby possible worlds appealed to in the construction procedure—by allowing for more and more radical perturbations—even seemingly stable difference-makers will sometimes be absent in the privileged set, thus making them at least potentially explanatorily relevant.
- 21.
Though not directly relevant to the causal selection problem—and thus not worth detailing here—Causal Economy requires a further constraint on abstraction to prevent a preference for disjunctive explanations that are contrived to be both abstract and stability boosting simultaneously. The constraint I prefer is a cohesion requirement—modeled on a standard from Strevens (2008)—on which a particular feature of the influential nexus cannot be made so abstract that it is impossible to move, in physical state space, from one possible realizer of it to another without moving through a realizer that is not an instance of it.
- 22.
A nuance: given that oxygen will infiltrate the factory following a failure of whatever mechanism was responsible for its evacuation, that failure itself may be an economical part of the causal-influential run-up. Thus the question arises as to whether it—and not the oxygen—might constitute the most economical—and thus complete—explanation. As far as I can tell, on the causal economy view both of these would make for good explanations, as both are unstable events that make the target event stable. They differ, of course, in their place in the temporal sequence, but causal economy will often find multiple co-equal (and equally complete) explanations that cite influences at different times (as well, as those at the same time). This, I hope, is such an instance.
- 23.
To spell out in more detail how the stability boost measure applies to a particular case, consider a specific signaling event, such as a particular monkey’s flight to the bush. To consider the stability boost of a signal from a neighboring animal, rewind the tape to some time before the signal was sent and perturb the actual world in a variety of ways, thus producing the set of privileged nearby possible worlds. Some number of these perturbations would prevent the signaling animal from emitting the call. And since the call itself is required for the hiding to occur (and because other factors equally required are themselves very stable), an explanans that includes the call’s production will substantially augment the stability of the hiding event.
- 24.
To be fair, it is unclear whether anyone really holds an across-the-board gene-centrism; even broadly ‘pro-gene’ philosophers, such as Weber and Rosenberg, articulate positions that are considerably more nuanced. If they too want to reject gene-centrism, our disagreement would concern the subtler issue of the standard by which a subset of an event’s necessary conditions—sometimes genetic ones and sometimes not—might be explanatorily privileged.
- 25.
There might also be cases in which multiple factors—some genetic and some not—are equally causally economical, and would each constitute complete explanations.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on this paper, thanks to David Frank, Maria Kronfleldner, Michael Strevens, David Velleman, two referees, and to (this volume’s editors) Pierre-Alain Braillard and Christophe Malaterre. Though I was not able to directly address all of the useful suggestions I received, they uniformly aided me in the development and presentation of my argument.
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Franklin-Hall, L.R. (2015). Explaining Causal Selection with Explanatory Causal Economy: Biology and Beyond. In: Explanation in Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9822-8_18
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