Causality

A central element of the empiricist project was to legitimize—and demystify—the concept of causality by subsuming it under the concept of lawful explanation, which, in turn, was modeled on deductive arguments. This project culminated in Carl Hempel (1905–1977) and Paul Oppenheim's Deductive-Nomological model of explanation. According to this, to offer an explanation of an event e is to construct a valid deductive argument of the following form:

Antecedent/Initial Conditions

Statements of Laws

Therefore, e (event/fact to be explained)

So, when the claim is made that event c causes event e (e.g., that the sugar cube dissolved because it was immersed in water), it should be understood as follows: there are relevant laws in virtue of which the occurrence of the antecedent condition c (putting the sugar in water) is nomologically sufficient for the occurrence of the event e (the dissolving of the sugar). It has been a standard criticism of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model that, insofar as it aims to offer sufficient and necessary conditions for an argument to count as a bona fide explanation, it fails. For, there are arguments that satisfy the structure of the DN-model, and yet fail to be bona fide explanations of a certain event. For instance, one can construct a deductive-nomological "explanation" of the height of a flagpole having as premises (a statement of) the length of its shadow and (statements of) relevant laws of optics, but this is not an explanation of why the flagpole has the height it does. In a sense, this counterexample repeats a point that we saw already made by Aristotle—namely, that good explanations are asymmetric: they explain effects in terms of causes and not conversely. Conversely, there are bona fide explanations that fail to instantiate the DN-model. For instance, one can construct an explanation of why there was a car crash (by telling a causal story of how it happened) without referring to any law at all. The joined message of these counterexamples is that the DN-model fails precisely because it ignores the role of causality in explanation. In other words, the moral of the counterexamples is there is more to the concept of causality than what can be captured by DN-explanations.