Explanatory Generalizations, Part II: Plumbing Explanatory Depth

[Introduction] Some explanations are deep and powerful: Newton’s explanation of the , Maxwell’s explanation of the propagation of light, Einstein’s explanation the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. Other explanations, while of the name, are superficial and shallow: Bob lashed out at Tom he was angry, the car accelerated because Mary depressed the gas with her foot, the salt dissolved because it was placed in water. We this intuition to be very natural and widely shared. Yet in the vast literature on explanation, there have been precious few to give any systematic account of this notion of explanatory . In this paper, we will provide such an account from within the of the manipulationist account of explanation presented in a paper (Woodward and Hitchcock 2003, hereafter referred to EG1; see also Woodward 1997a, 2000).