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Explanation, Invariance, and Intervention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Jim Woodward
Jim Woodward*
Affiliation:
California Institue of Technology
*
†Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 228-77, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, [email protected].
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Abstract

This paper defends a counterfactual account of explanation, according to which successful explanation requires tracing patterns of counterfactual dependence of a special sort, involving what I call active counterfactuals. Explanations having this feature must appeal to generalizations that are invariant—stable under certain sorts of changes. These ideas are illustrated by examples drawn from physics and econometrics.

Type
Symposium: Causal Asymmetry, Intervention, and Chance
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 64 , Issue S4: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1996 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers Dec., 1997 , 1997 , pp. S26 - S41
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1997

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Footnotes

‡

Research for this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation. I am grateful to Fiona Cowie, Dave Hilbert, Alan Hajek, Kim Sterelny, and especially Nancy Cartwright and Dan Hausman for helpful discussion. I might add that the conception of explanation defended here is in many ways very similar in spirit to the conception in Hausman's forthcoming book, Causal Asymmetries, and that in particular my remarks about the explanatory significance of the econometric notion of autonomy closely parallel Hausman's ideas about the role of what he calls independent alterability in explanation.

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