Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation

Despite its clarity and eloquence, Woodward’s wonderful book does not wear its virtues on its sleeve. You need the whole shirt. I aim to let those virtues show a bit more, and that requires some background to explain what Woodward has accomplished. Philosophical theories come chiefly in two flavors, Socratic and Euclidean. Socratic philosophical theories, whose paradigm is The Meno, advance an analysis (sometimes called an ‘explication’), a set of purportedly necessary and sufficient conditions for some concept, giving its meaning; in justification they consider examples, putative counterexamples, alternative analyses, and relations to other concepts. Euclidean philosophical theories, whose paradigm is The Elements, advance assumptions, considerations taken to warrant them, and investigate the consequences of the assumptions. Socratic theories have the form of definitions. Analyses of ‘virtue’, ‘cause’, ‘knowledge’, ‘confirmation’ and ‘explanation’ are ancient and recent examples. Euclidian theories have the form of formal or informal axiomatic systems and are often essentially mathematical: Euclid’s geometry, Frege’s logic, Kolmogorov’s probabilities, and David Lewis’ theory of the logic of counterfactuals are examples. That of course does not mean that Euclidean theories do not also contain definitions, but their definitions are not philosophical analyses of concepts. Nor does it mean that the