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

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. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue 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. 1. Introduction 2. Interventionism, Proportionality, and Franklin-Hall’s Objection 3. Exhaustivity Reconsidered 4. Interventionism and the Explanatory Value of Specificity 5. Conclusion