Abstract versus Causal Explanations?

ABSTRACT

In the recent literature on causal and non-causal scientific explanations, there is an intuitive assumption (which we call the ‘abstractness assumption’) according to which an explanation is non-causal by virtue of being abstract. In this context, to be ‘abstract’ means that the explanans in question leaves out many or almost all causal microphysical details of the target system. After motivating this assumption, we argue that the abstractness assumption, in placing the abstract and the causal character of an explanation in tension, is misguided in ways that are independent of which view of causation or causal explanation one takes to be most accurate. On major accounts of causation, as well as on major accounts of causal explanation, the abstractness of an explanation is not sufficient for it being non-causal. That is, explanations are not non-causal by dint of being abstract.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Maria Kronfeldner, Insa Lawler, Chris Pincock, and Juha Saatsi, as well as to audiences in Helsinki, Leeds, and Munich for their constructive comments and suggestions. Particularly, we would like to thank four anonymous referees and the editor of this journal for their critical remarks that greatly helped to sharpen the argument of the paper. Andersen is grateful for the opportunity to live and work on unceded Coast Salish territory.

Notes

1. Even though the output of the Krebs citric acid cycle can be characterised abstractly as ‘energy’, it is usually characterised in non-abstract terms, for example, two extra units of adenosine triphosphate.

2. We use the notion of multiple realisability to refer to (a) the fact that some types of higher-level behaviours can be realised by multiple types of microphysical behaviours, and (b) the fact that some tokens of higher-level behaviours can be instantiated by multiple tokens of microphysical behaviours. However, the differences between (a) and (b) are not central to our concern in this paper.

3. Pincock uses the following example as an illustration. Suppose a traveller attempts to traverse all of the bridges of Königsberg without crossing any bridge twice. The traveller fails. Why did the traveller fail? The non-causal explanation of this failure consists in realising that the bridge system of Königsberg instantiates the structure of a non-Eulerian graph and due to the formal properties of such a graph it is impossible to traverse all of the bridges exactly once (Pincock 2012, 51–53). Pincock claims that this explanation is abstract non-causal because the explanatorily relevant factor (i.e. Königsberg instantiating the structure of a non-Eulerian graph) is counterfactually stable under changes in the micro-constitution of the bridges: ‘Supposing that the bridges are made of stone, we can see clearly that changing the bridges to gold, while preserving the isomorphism to the relevant graph, would keep the impossibility of the circuit intact’ (Pincock 2012, 54).

4. We take counterfactual theories, broadly construed, to include Lewis’s (1973) classic counterfactual account; recent interventionist developments such as Hausman (1998), Hitchcock (2001), and Halpern and Pearl (2005); and also some agency theories of causation such as von Wright (1974) and Menzies and Price (1993).

5. It is a commonplace in today’s philosophy of causation that there are token-level and type-level causation. As a matter of fact, type-level causes play a far more prominent role in the sciences than token-level causation. However, Batterman seems to hold that there is only token-level causation (Batterman 2002, 24–25; 2010, 21). Not acknowledging the existence of type-level causation is another point regarding which Batterman is in tension with the causation literature and, strikingly, science.

6. A similar claim seems to hold for the epistemology of causation, if one adopts a counterfactual account. The existence of a causal relationship can be clearly established using evidence that does not ever have to involve a detailed mechanism, or any detailed or concrete connection between the cause and effect in question. For instance, a randomised controlled trial may provide suitable evidence for the effective workings of a new drug without providing evidence about the detailed mechanisms of how the drug influences the test subjects (Woodward 2003, 95–98).

7. Note that Dowe rejects many cases often considered causal, putting them in the category of ‘causation*’ instead, making his conserved quantity theory arguably one of the most restrictive accounts of causation. Yet still, even this account allows for the kind of abstractness taken by the abstractness assumption to be indicative of non-causality.

8. Kuhlmann’s (2014) recent work on structural mechanistic explanations in econophysics provides another interesting example.