Argumentos y explicaciones causales ordinarios: distinción teórica

Abstract

In this paper I will try to show in its main lines, from some of Frege’s and Margáin-Davidson’s thesis, the theoretical framework from which we can draw the distinction between ordinary reasonings and causal explanations. Such framework clearly arises observing that reasonings and explanations belong to different kinds of linguistic objects, and that there are at least four different types of explanations corresponding to four different senses of the term ‘cause’: cause as (necessary and/or sufficient) condition and cause as causal event. This emerges from such drawing: explanations presupposing the notion of cause in the conditional sense are reducible to reasonings; but not those presupposing it in the sense of causal event. The main point of all of this resides in the enormous similitude that exists between ordinary reasonings and explanations, and in that it has been sustained, inside the subject’s literature (remarkably in Hempel), that such explanations, being just a kind of enthymematic reasoning, are necessarily incomplete, provisional or mere sketches needed of justification; but they are not. The picture that eventually emerges on such distinctions is this: ordinary reasonings and explanations are two relatively distinct types of discourses with a vast common zone of intersection, but with huge disjunct or detached zones between them too.