Opening the Black Box

Philosophers of science often argue that an explanation must rest on a general law. To explain an event is to cite a set of initial conditions together with a statement to the effect that whenever those conditions obtain an event of that type follows. In this chapter I offer two objections to this idea, one moderate and relatively uncontroversial, the other more radical and open to dispute.

The first objection is that even if we can establish a general law from which we can deduce the explanandum (the second objection denies that we can always do this), this does not always amount to an explanation. Once again, we may refer to the distinction between explanation on the one hand and correlation and necessitation on the other. A general law to the effect that certain symptoms of a disease are always followed by death does not explain why the person died. A general law based on the fundamental nature of the disease does not explain the death if the disease was preempted by a suicide or a car accident.

To get around these problems, it is often argued that we should replace the idea of a general law with that of a mechanism. Actually, as I use the term “mechanism” in a special sense later, I shall use the phrase “causal chain” to denote what I have in mind here.