4 - CAUSAL EXPLANATION

Summary

In attempting an analysis of causation, I am traversing a terrain littered with the remains of other philosophical theories. Many of these theories foundered because they made a two-stage attack on the problem. They set out to define ‘cause’ in terms of ‘law’ in the hope of then explaining what a ‘law’ was in other terms, a task which turned out to be impossible. I shall tackle ‘cause’ and ‘law’ together by using the notion of a coincidence to analyse them both. The basic idea is that causes are events which ensure their effects are no coincidence. Laws are statements which support causal and other scientific explanations, that enable us to resolve coincidences, and it is this ability to resolve coincidences which gives laws their empirical character. I do not pretend that the notion of ‘coincidence’ itself can be analysed without reliance on modal vocabulary, but we can at least distinguish natural laws from other modal generalisations by reference to their empirical character. So both ‘cause’ and ‘law’ can be elucidated in other terms.

EMPIRICAL CONTENT

In chapter 2 (pages 35–6), I observed that the language of science was full of dispositional notions. Terms for physical quantities, such as mass or electricity, are to be understood by reference to the usual behaviour of those quantities and substances in various circumstances. Indeed, it is hard to see how we could form a conception of the physical phenomena which enter into scientific laws other than in nomological terms; there simply is no other way we can think of them.