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Contrastive Explanation and Causal Triangulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Peter Lipton
Peter Lipton*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science Cambridge University
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, ENGLAND.
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Abstract

Alan Garfinkel (1981) and Bas van Fraassen (1980), among others, have proposed a contrastive theory of explanation, according to which the proper form of an explanatory why-question is not simply “Why P?” but “Why P rather than Q?”. Dennis Temple (1988) has argued in this journal that the contrastive explanandum “P rather than Q” is equivalent to the conjunction, “P and not-Q”. I show that the contrast is not equivalent to the conjunction, nor to other plausible noncontrastive candidates. I then consider David Lewis's (1986) proposal for the way contrasts determine an explanatory cause, which does not require recasting the contrastive explanandum. Lewis's proposal is found to be unacceptable, but it suggests an improvement that shows contrastive explanations to employ a mechanism of “causal triangulation”, similar to Mill's method of difference.

Information

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 687 - 697
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Philip Clayton, David Ruben, Edward Stein, Nick Thompson, Jonathan Vogel, David Weissbord, Alan White, Tim Williamson, and Eddy Zemach for helpful discussions about contrastive explanation. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for constructive criticism of an earlier draft of this paper.

References

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Temple, D. (1988), “Discussion: The Contrast Theory of Why-Questions”, Philosophy of Science 55: 141–151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Fraassen, B. (1980), The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar