Abstract

Recent years have seen growing interest in modifying interventionist accounts of causal explanation in order to characterise noncausal explanation. However, one surprising element of such accounts is that they have typically jettisoned the core feature of interventionism: interventions. Indeed, the prevailing opinion within the philosophy of science literature suggests that interventions exclusively demarcate causal relationships. This position is so prevalent that, until now, no one has even thought to name it. We call it “intervention puritanism”. In this paper, we mount the first sustained defence of the idea that there are distinctively noncausal explanations which can be characterized in terms of possible interventions; and thus, argue that I-puritanism is false. We call the resultant position “intervention liberalism” (I-liberalism, for short). While many have followed Woodward (Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003) in committing to I-pluralism, we trace support for I-liberalism back to the work of Kim (in: Kim (ed) Supervenience and mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974/1993). Furthermore, we analyse two recent sources of scepticism regarding I-liberalism: debate surrounding mechanistic constitution; and attempts to provide a monistic account of explanation. We show that neither literature provides compelling reasons for adopting I-puritanism. Finally, we present a novel taxonomy of available positions upon the role of possible interventions in explanation: weak causal imperialism; strong causal imperialism; monist intervention puritanism; pluralist intervention puritanism; monist intervention liberalism; and finally, the specific position defended in this paper, pluralist intervention liberalism.

Highlights

  • Recent years have seen growing interest in the prospect of modifying interventionist analyses of causal explanation, popularized by James Woodward (2003), in order to characterize explanations which are seemingly noncausal in nature.1 One seemingly odd feature typically shared by such accounts, is that they jettison the core feature of interventionism: interventions

  • We highlight six such positions: weak causal imperialism; strong causal imperialism; monist intervention puritanism; pluralist intervention puritanism; monist intervention liberalism; and the position defended in this paper, pluralist intervention liberalism

  • We argued, is that the notion of a possible intervention does not line up with the distinction between causal and noncausal explanation

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Summary

Introduction

Recent years have seen growing interest in the prospect of modifying interventionist analyses of causal explanation, popularized by James Woodward (2003), in order to characterize explanations which are seemingly noncausal in nature. One seemingly odd feature typically shared by such accounts, is that they jettison the core feature of interventionism: interventions. Which is to say that interventions exclusively demarcate causal explanations.2 Prevalent is this position that, until now, no one has seen fit to name it. While dissenting voices have begun to appear (including Woodward (2018) himself), this paper represents the first sustained defence of the idea that there are distinctively noncausal explanations which can be characterized in terms of such interventions; in other words, that possible interventions do not carve nature at its causal joints.. While dissenting voices have begun to appear (including Woodward (2018) himself), this paper represents the first sustained defence of the idea that there are distinctively noncausal explanations which can be characterized in terms of such interventions; in other words, that possible interventions do not carve nature at its causal joints.3 We call this position “intervention liberalism” (I-liberalism, for short). Given the relatively recent emergence of interest in interventionism with respect to noncausal explanation, it might come as some surprise to discover that precedence for I-liberalism can be found as far back as the 1970s.4 In a series of (largely overlooked) papers, Jaegwon Kim argues against causal imperialism, the view that all explanations track causal relations. In ‘Causes and Counterfactuals’ (1973) Kim

A Defence of Manipulationist Noncausal Explanation
Kim on Noncausal Connections
An Interventionist Account of “Bringing About”
I‐Liberalism and Constitutive Explanation
16 Other examples of constitutive mechanistic explanation abound
Woodward’s I‐Puritanism
Dependency condition
Noncausal Interventions and Common Explanatory Dependencies
Concluding Remarks on Taxonomy
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