Relevance, not Invariance, Explanatoriness, not Manipulability: Discussion of Woodward on Explanatory Relevance

Cyrille Imbert (1)

1 LHSP - Laboratoire d'Histoire des Sciences et de Philosophie - Archives Henri Poincaré

According to Woodward's causal model of explanation, explanatory information is relevant for manipulation purposes and indicates by means of invariant causal relations how to change the value of certain target explanandum variables by intervening on others. Therefore, the depth of an explanation is evaluated through the size of the domain of invariance of the generalization involved. In this paper, I argue that Woodward's account of explanatory relevance is still unsatisfactory and claim that the depth of an explanation should be explicated in terms of the size of the domain of circumstances which it designates as leaving the explanandum unchanged.

Mots clés: explanation; explanatory relevance; woodward; causal model; manipulation

Domaines: Philosophie

Cyrille Imbert. Relevance, not Invariance, Explanatoriness, not Manipulability: Discussion of Woodward on Explanatory Relevance. Philosophy of Science, 2013, 80, pp.625 - 636. ⟨10.1086/674002⟩. ⟨hal-01098487⟩