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Having constructed a theory of causation, it is time to apply it. In the next three chapters, I shall focus on various areas where matters can be advanced by adopting some of the theses and making some of the distinctions already introduced. In this chapter, it is the relationship between the different sciences which concerns me, in chapter 7 the problem of deviant causal chains and in chapter 8 the explanation of human action. Each of these issues may be made more tractable by bringing my apparatus to bear on it.
One of the most obvious facts about contemporary science is that it is partitioned into different disciplines. Physicists, biologists, psychologists and economists each have a distinctive vocabulary in which they formulate laws and explain the events which interest them. In the heyday of positivism, philosophers sought to provide these scientists with a translation manual – a manual which would enable the physicist to restate in his own terms what the economist was saying when he offered an economic explanation for an increase in unemployment (Carnap, 1949). But such a manual could not be produced and philosophers of science were forced to acknowledge a plurality of scientific theories.
If we have more than one science on our hands, then we must provide some account of the relationship between them. An important part of this task is to effect a reconciliation between two widely shared opinions. On the one hand, there is the conviction that physics is the fundamental science.
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