LA PLURALIDAD DE LA EXPERIENCIA RELIGIOSA WILLIAM JAMES

It is a natural thought that the counterintuitive instances of DN explanations arise precisely because, in doing away with the notion of causation, significant causal

considerations have not been respected. Thus, while perhaps the current arrangement of the solar system is nomically determined by both the future arrangement and past arrangement, only the past arrangement caused the present arrangement. In this way our intuitions against temporally symmetrical explanations can be preserved. Similarly, what is going on in the case of the barometer and the storm is easily explicable via an appeal to causal notions. The barometer reading does not cause, and thus does not explain, the storm. Rather, the storm and the reading are both caused (and explained) by the change in air pressure.

This reaction to the DN counterexamples has motivated those with less positivistic tendencies to posit theories of explanation which make explicit appeal to causal

relatedness. Wesley Salmon (1984), for example, argues that many scientific explanations track ontologically upstanding, worldly relations: namely the causal relations. For Salmon,                                                                                                                

the cause—and thus explanation—of an event is cashed out in terms of spatiotemporally continuous causal processes which “transmit causal influence from one part of spacetime to another” (Salmon, 1984:297) and causal interactions themselves, which occur when multiple causal processes intersect in spacetime and impact one another in a lasting fashion. The lasting impacts of these intersections are known as ‘marks’. Thus the explanation of an event will involve a story about the marks which led to the event.

Causal processes are distinguished from ‘pseudo-processes’ insofar as genuine causal processes have the ability to transmit marks. For example, if I am driving down the road and my car runs into a pole, the pole will be ‘modified’ in a lasting fashion: it is now dented. Meanwhile, the car’s shadow, making its way down the road next to me, might ‘hit’ any number of objects. However, when the shadow moves on the object has not been modified, and this inability to leave marks identifies it as a pseudo-process. This characterisation makes clear that there is a counterfactual element to the notion of a causal process. A lonely electron travelling through the outer reaches of space without ever encountering another object counts as a causal process because if it had encountered something it would have marked it.

A more modern incarnation of this kind of view is found in Dowe’s (2000)

conserved quantity theory. Dowe appeals to the notion of ‘conserved quantities’ found in physics, such as momentum. In this way the nature of the marks required for a causal interaction can be made clearer: when the cue ball transfers some of its momentum to the eight ball, a causal interaction has taken place.

I’ll remain neutral between these views, simply assuming that some satisfactory story about the causal processes themselves is available. Nevertheless, there are two distinct incarnations of the causal process theory, understood as a theory of scientific explanation, that require our consideration, here. The first is the unfiltered theory, which has it that any putative explanation which tracks a causal relation counts as an

explanation. The second is the psychologistically filtered causal process theory, which demands that the putative explanations also have the right sort of epistemic character. That is, which causal relations are explanatory is relative to a psychological orientation.

The causal process theories both do well with covering cases. Even in the cases where, as it happens, scientists tend to explain some phenomenon by reference to a natural law, as long as there are causal processes running from the explanans to

explanandum the causal process theorist can say she has the case covered.46 _Assuming

that nothing causes itself, the views also do well with irreflexivity. Furthermore, the asymmetry of most accounts of causation is inherited by the attendant theory of scientific explanation.

However, the unfiltered causal process theory struggles with relevance. Even if the barometer case is dealt with, it does less well with another famous counterexample to the DN view, ironically posed by Salmon himself (1971). Consider that it may be a law that no man who takes birth control pills will fall pregnant: it’s a generalisation, and is surely no accident! Thus there is an argument from the fact that a man called Jones takes birth control pills, via this law, to the conclusion that he does not fall pregnant. The problem, of course, is that the birth control pills seem irrelevant.

However, (following Hitchcock, 1995) consider that there are spatiotemporally continuous causal processes running from the taking of the pills through to their digestion and the absorption of their ingredients, to the eventual non-pregnant state of Jones. Whatever concerns we might have about explaining the lack of pregnancy in terms of the birth control pills on the DN view are also concerns for the causal process view, so long as there is no way of distinguishing the relevant causal processes from the irrelevant ones. Indeed, on this view any event in the past light cone of the explanandum from which we can trace a causal process counts as part of the explanans.

Similar considerations apply to the understanding desideratum. For example, the initial state of the universe exerted causal influence that is still shaping events today, and yet including these ancient influences in an explanation does little to increase our

understanding of why current events are as they are. Ultimately, however, the defender of the unfiltered causal process theory will likely espouse an ontic understanding of explanation, and will thus see these apparent shortcomings as a feature, rather than a flaw (or, at least, she will dismiss them as insignificant). The complete explanation will, in Salmon’s terms, have situated the explanandum within a causal nexus, and include all of the causal information leading up to its occurrence. While this story will do nothing to

highlight some process we intuit to be in need of highlighting, it is a complete story. The

inability of our finite minds to comprehend some elements of the explanantia, and our tendency to focus on some elements thereof, is completely beside the point. Of course,                                                                                                                

46 _{Arguably, causal process theories struggle to handle cases of absence causation (though see Beebee,}

the view does very well according to objectivity. Thus, if one prefers an ontic view of explanation to an epistemic one the view remains attractive.

However, if one does not share the conviction that explanation is a worldly

phenomenon, divorced from our interests and comprehension, is it natural to give up on objectivity and apply some kind of psychologistic filtration to the causal process theory. Thus, while explanations will still cite causal processes, not all such processes will underlie an explanation. The addition of such pragmatic considerations allows us to attend to different causal processes in different contexts, perhaps using machinery similar to van Fraassen’s. This helps us achieve relevance. Jonathan Schaffer (2005), for

example, advocates a contrastive treatment of causation. Consider again the case of Jones. We might ask: why is Jones not pregnant, as opposed to being pregnant? Simplifying greatly, the answer is not that Jones took birth control pills, as opposed to not taking the pills, but that he is male rather than female. As Jones is male, the causal influence of the birth controls does not favour the former over the latter, and so despite the presence of a causal process this does not explain his lack of pregnancy.

This view also has the power to rule out explanations that are incomprehensible, and fail to increase our understanding. In most contexts, for example, causal processes which began a long time before the explanandum event will not help us comprehend why the event occurred. However, this will vary according to context. For example, imagine that we are interested in why a player was injured in a football game. We gain the most understanding by focussing on the moments just before the injury happened: exactly how the tackle occurred, the way in which the ankle twisted, etc. Perhaps we also gain some understanding by looking a little earlier: the warm-up before the game, the recent training schedule. If we are interested in why that player was injured, while another player involved in a similar tackle, with the same training schedule etc was not, we might look back a little further, even to genetic influences on how their bodies developed. It seems that there is no context, however, in which the initial conditions of the universe can shed light on why the injury occurred. In contrast, if we are interested in the question of why the universe is currently expanding, it seems that an understanding of the causal processes emanating from the early events of the universe does become relevant, and does serve to increase our understanding. For those interested in the epistemic dimension of explanation, this kind of contextual sensitivity is a considerable advantage.

To summarise the available causal process theories, on the one hand we have the unfiltered view, which maintains objectivity and is friendly to those who think of

explanation as an ontic phenomenon. The view struggles with relevance and illumination, but this is presumably of little concern to its proponents. On the other hand we have the psychologistically filtered view, which allows us to zone in on the causal processes we actually find explanatory in a particular context, at the cost of abandoning objectivity. It is noteworthy that there is no view here which has the best of both worlds, such that it is an objective matter what explains what, yet the class of explanations perfectly coincides with our epistemic explanatory intuitions.