Explanation

Marco J. Nathan (University of Denver)
What is the role of causation in causal explanation? Is the answer not obvious? Causation provides the raw material, the foundation for explanation. This response unveils a common presupposition, namely, that causes play a uniform role across theories of causation and explanation. This essay undermines this assumption. I distinguish two roles for causes. The first is the traditional philosophical tenet of causes as metaphysical posits. The second is more prominent across the sciences. Here, causes are often conceptualized as explanatory postulates which lack the former kind of ontological import. I conclude by emphasizing how this simple distinction provides a promising solution to longstanding philosophical puzzles.

Jared Millson (Agnes Scott College), Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury College), Gabe Doble (Harvard Law School)
A growing consensus holds that all explanations, causal or otherwise, support change-relating (CR) counterfactuals. Unfortunately, this proposal, which we call CR-monism, has not been precisely defined. In this paper, we fill this lacuna by providing a detailed articulation of CR-monism dubbed "quasi-interventionism." While no extant account of CR-monism, not even our own, manages to provide genuinely sufficient conditions on explanations, we argue that quasi-interventionism is both plausible and preferable to alternatives insofar as it supplies necessary conditions that are logically stronger than any currently available.

Samuel Schindler (Aarhus University)
Einstein famously distinguished between constructive and principle theories. He believed only the former to be explanatory. Lange has recently argued that principle theories explain, too, by virtue of putting necessary constraints on the laws of physics. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the fact that constructive theories also offer explanations in terms of necessities: they represent contingent regularities as necessities. I call this feature 'structural necessitation' and the understanding afforded by it 'how-necessarily' understanding. In contrast to the necessities of Lange's explanations by constraint, structural necessitation can be brought about by causal mechanisms.

William D'Alessandro (University of Illinois, Chicago)
According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science (the "Dependence Thesis"), all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I call "viewing-as explanations", are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren't supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the thesis isn't true in general. The first part of the paper defends this claim. The second part considers whether viewing-as explanations occur in the empirical sciences, focusing on the case of so-called fictional models.

Hugh Desmond (KU Leuven)
It remains unclear whether the behavior of nonlinear feedback systems, which can include approach to equilibrium, abrupt phase transitions, and chaos, pose mere technical challenges or more fundamental problems for interventionist causal analysis. In this paper I argue for the latter in that interventionist analysis is fundamentally inapplicable to causal relations between variables that are related through nonlinear feedback. I then discuss how interventionist analysis can yield more meaningful causal knowledge concerning the dependence of global system behavior on parameters values.