Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just Right

Jan 1, 2020·
Thomas Blanchard
Thomas Blanchard
· 0 min read
Abstract
Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. I argue (against Franklin-Hall) that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explanation, namely identifying possible interventions that would have changed the explanandum.
Type
Publication
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 71(2), 633-663
publication
Thomas Blanchard
Authors
Maître de Conférences en Philosophie

I am Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy and psychology in the Concepts and Cognition Lab at UC-Berkeley for the Varieties of Understanding Project, an Assistant Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and an Akademischer Rat (roughly equivalent to assistant professor) at the University of Cologne. I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2014.

My research is in the philosophy of science, and focuses mainly on causation, causal modeling and causal explanation. I am interested in a wide variety of issues concerning causation including causal asymmetries, levels of causal explanation, the causal exclusion problem, the epistemology of causal inference, causal cognition, and causal decision theory. My work also investigates the use of certain causal concepts and assumptions in particular sciences such as biology, epidemiology and medicine.