Abstract
In this article I assess Alisa Bokulich’s idea that explanatory model fictions can be genuinely explanatory. I draw attention to a tension in her account between the claim that model fictions are explanatorily autonomous, and the demand that model fictions be justified in order for them to be genuinely explanatory. I also explore the consequences that arise from Bokulich’s use of Woodward’s account of counterfactual explanation and her abandonment of Woodward’s notion of an intervention. As it stands, Bokulich’s account must be deemed unworkable.
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Notes
Alternatively, one may here also appeal to the motivation for C2 provided in Sect. 3.
I owe this extension to one of the anonymous referees of this journal.
Interestingly, Bokulich sometimes inplicitly (and unknowingly?) seems to appeal to interventions when, for example, speaking of classical orbits ‘being changed’ (see Sect. 2.2).
Woodward makes this step after considering various counterexamples to the weak physical possibility constraint. The details of this step are beyond the current discussion.
Backtracking counterfactuals are counterfactuals where one “back-tracks” in time from an effect to its cause so that “had e been different, c would have been different”. More appropriately, perhaps, one should here speak of the counterfactual “backtracking” from the explanandum to the explanans. For explicit statements that causal models encode (only non-backtracking) counterfactual information see (Woodward 2003, p. 43) and especially (Hitchcock 2001).
Note that it may also be the case that, vice versa, X counterfactually depends on Y. That would be the back-tracking counterfactual of the counterfactual mentioned in the text. However the model is “blind” to such dependencies. It merely represents non-backtracking counterfactuals.
That causal models, as used by Woodward, normally encode information about counterfactuals that are true in the actual world becomes particularly clear in his comparison of his account to Lewis’s (133–145). There he judges the relevance of possible worlds to the evaluation of a counterfactual on the basis of a causal model that encodes counterfactual information of the actual world. This aspect is not to be confused with the fact that causal models represent possible worlds in terms of variable values. Overall, one may therefore say that causal models \(<\)V,E\(>\) represent possible worlds in the variables V and the actual world in the structural equations E relating these variables.
Miracles in Lewis’s account are analogous to Woodward’s notion of an intervention. See Glynn (forthcoming) for a thorough comparison of Woodward’s and Lewis’ accounts.
References
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Acknowledgments
I thank the audiences at the Causality in the Sciences (CaitS) conference in Ghent, at the Annual Meeting of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in Bristol (both in 2011), and at the Department of Philosophy at Aarhus University for their feedback. I also thank Brian Hepburn and Franz Huber for reading earlier versions and for providing helpful comments. I’m particularly indebted to an anonymous referee of this journal for detailed and challenging remarks.
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Schindler, S. Explanatory fictions—for real?. Synthese 191, 1741–1755 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0362-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0362-5