Chapter 1 - a few opening remarks

Why are explanations are important

#Scientific_realism Why-questions are important, for example, in the philosophy of science. #Scientific_realism means different things to different people, but one idea commonly associated with this doctrine is that it is one of the aims of science to answer why-questions. Science aims to figure out why things happen, not just describe, even very systematically, what happens.

Action

Why-questions are also important in the philosophy of #action. They help identify one central topic in the philosophy of action, namely intentional action: someone acts intentionally if, and only if, one may ask “Why did he do it?”—where “why” is used in a special way, different from the way it is used when we ask why the moon is waning. (This is Anscombe’s proposal in Intention (§5)

Metaphysics Why-questions are important in metaphysics. The obvious example is their importance to the theory of grounding. Many metaphysicians are very busy producing theories of grounding. A common strategy for helping initiates get a handle on the subject matter of these theories is to say that when one fact grounds another, the first may be used to answer the question why the second obtains.

Modality If some fact F obtains in two possible worlds W and V, then those worlds are in one respect similar. Boris Kment argues, in “Counterfactuals and Explanation,” that this respect of similarity matters for how close V and W are, in the sense of closeness relevant to evaluating counterfactuals, if and only if the question why F obtains has the same answer in both worlds.

Normative Ethics A theory that correctly sorts acts into right and wrong is still false if it gives the wrong answer to the question of why right acts are right

Philsophy of Mind view about the status of mental facts is physicalism, the view that all mental facts are determined by physical facts. But there is a well-known problem for physicalism, a problem known as the #explanatory_gap. What is this problem? What is the gap? The explanatory gap is just this: physicalists have no answer to the question why the physical facts determine the mental ones in the way that they do.

Epistemology “Inference to the best explanation” is the pattern of belief formation whereby, of the possible answers to the question why one’s evidence obtains (or, perhaps, why one has that evidence), one comes to believe the “best” answer.

Goal of the book that is my view about answers to why-questions about events. In this book I will (almost) defend a version of the idea that an answer to the question why some given event E happened must cite causes of E. This idea has been around for a while, but (you will not be surprised to learn) I don’t think others’ defenses of it have been good enough.

I do hope, however, to persuade them that a theory of answers to why-questions should be a theory of reasons why, even if it should not be the one I defend. I will propose a theory of what it takes for one fact to be a reason why some other fact obtains.

I make use of a distinction, a distinction that is much easier to see when we think in terms of reasons why than if we don’t. It is a distinction between different levels of reasons why.

There are, on the one hand, the reasons why it is the case that F, on the other the reasons why those reasons are reasons.

This distinction is an essential component of my strategy for explaining away many apparent counterexamples to the idea that answers to why questions about events must cite causes.

I need to say something about explanation: about why my theory of explanation isn’t a theory of explanation, and about why no one else’s should be either.