A theory of contrastive causal explanation and its implications concerning the explanatoriness of deterministic and prob
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(2020) 10:34
PAPER IN GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
A theory of contrastive causal explanation and its implications concerning the explanatoriness of deterministic and probabilistic hypotheses Elliott Sober 1 Received: 27 October 2019 / Accepted: 23 June 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Carl Hempel (1965) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Richard Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive causal explanation is described and defended. It provides a new limit on what probabilistic hypotheses can explain; the limitation is that P cannot explain why E is true rather than A if P assign E a probability that is less than or equal to the probability that P assigns to A. The view entails that a true deterministic theory and a true probabilistic theory that apply to the same explanandum partition are such that the deterministic theory explains all the true contrastive propositions constructable from that partition, whereas the probabilistic theory often fails to do so. Keywords Contrastivism . Determinism . Explanation . Explanatoriness . Probability
1 Introduction Hempel (1965) argued that if hypothesis H explains why E is true, then H must confer on E a probability that is greater than 0.5. Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary by appealing to persuasive examples like the following. In Mendelian genetics, if an offspring is an AA homozygote, this would be explained if its parents are both AB heterozygotes, even though the probability that that parental pair will produce an AA offspring is only 0.25. The process of haploid gamete
* Elliott Sober [email protected]
1
Philosophy Department, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
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formation and the coming together of sperm and egg in reproduction to form a diploid embryo is doing the explaining. I think that Salmon and Jeffrey were right and Hempel was wrong here, and I will assume that that is true in what follows. The question concerning what a probabilistic theory can explain is different from a second question: if probabilistic theory P and deterministic theory D both explain why E is true, does the deterministic theory provide the better explanation? Jeffrey (1969) and Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) took a stand on this second question as well. They were “egalitarians,” claiming that a theory that says that a given explanandum has a low probability can be just as explanatory as a theory that says that that explanandum has a high probability. Strevens (2000, 2008) argues for the contrary position (i.e., for “elitism”) by presenting historical case studies. Cla
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