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I have many ideas about explanations, and I have difficulties in bringing them all together under a sufficiently catching key-word. I have tried a nuanced, manyfaceted and in-depth argued approach elsewhere, and I will now try the opposite. By varying a trivial example along a single dimension I will put forward my main thesis: that an explanation is not a logical structure, that it cannot be characterised in syntactic terms, but it is rather an epistemological structure, and, more specifically, a structure organising conceptual content.

In the following I will discuss some of the issues that an explanation-theory should address. Though it is an attempt to stay away from the question as to which particular theory that is the correct one, I will argue for and against different alternatives in ways of addressing these issues. Partly, what I will try to do is start listing some of the issues over which we, as philosophers in the theory of explanation, should make up our minds. In some cases this making up of minds will consist of agreeing on terminology and in some cases it deals with deeper questions. First I would like to clear up some terminological issues. I will use the following terms in the following way:

In this paper, I will discuss the idea of contrastive . I will restrict my discussion to singular causal explanation, but the basic ideas and the arguments have a broader application. They are relevant also to other kinds of explanations. In the first section I will first present the intuitive idea of contrastive questions, and then elaborate it by discussing typical criteria for the choice of a contrast. I also suggest a novel way to see the difference between scientific and everyday explanatory questions. In the second section I will discuss the major criticisms presented against contrastive theories of explanation in order to further clarify my position. I argue that all can be analyzed as contrastive and that this is a fruitful approach in understanding explanatory questions. I also argue that the contrastive thesis should be understood as a claim about what an explanation explain, not as a thesis about what the explainee has in her mind. Finally, I defend the thesis that a contrastive can be reduced to a non-contrastive against the arguments presented by Dennis Temple and John W. Carroll.

Explanation is one of the most discussed notions in philosophy of science. This may be because there is little consensus among specialists on how explanation in a scientific context should be characterised. Three main approaches appear to be alive today: the view, the view, and the view. Between these three classes of theories little agreement seems possible.

Events have causes. We often try to explain events, and we often succeed. The causal relation is a relation in the world which either holds or fails to hold independently of how its relata are described: the relation is extensional, and its relata are normally taken to be events. The explanatory relation is, however, intensional. This means that we cannot replace a term with co-referring or coextensional terms within an explanatory context without risking that we change the truth-value of the whole. I shall simply say that “explains” is an intensional relation, and I do that without thinking of this as an ontological commitment, or as something that anything really hangs on.

Causal explanation proceeds by citing the causes of the . Any model of causal explanation requires a specification of the relation between cause and effect in virtue of which citing the cause explains the effect. In particular, it requires a specification of what it is for the to be causally dependent on the and what types of things (broadly understood) the are.

According to Wesley Salmon, causal explanations of singular facts must contain descriptions of the causal interactions that caused the fact to be explained, and descriptions of the causal processes that link these interactions to one another and to the explanandum event. In his view, a causal explanation is a description of a causal net in which causal interactions are the nodes and causal processes constitute the links between the nodes. The explanatory power of an explanation depends on its : an explanation is better than another if it cites more relevant causal interactions and causal processes. It is not a desideratum that an explanation makes the explanandum highly probable. This view is opposed by among others Nancy Cartwright, who gives the following example:

The simplest and most convenient way to present the unificationist model of explanation is to state what the unificationist sees as the necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being a scientific explanation. This exposition will also make it clear how the unificationist model relates to Hempel’s covering law model, as well as what distinguishes the two.

Explanations appealing to natural selection have an unusual and paradoxical feature. While we may explain general truths using such explanations, those explanations do not transfer to the particular instances of those general truths. Thus natural selection and the selective advantage of speed in escaping predators can explain why healthy, normal, adult gazelles can run fast.

Inference to the best explanation (IBE) is theoretically interesting in that it promises to throw new light on what an explanation is. IBE challenges the standard view of the relation between inference and explanation. We tend to think that first we infer then we scan our pool of inferences for suitable explanations. But as Peter Lipton (2004, Chapter 4) convincingly argues, and as we all suspected from detective stories, this view seriously underestimates the epistemic role of explanation.