High-Level Explanation and the Interventionist’s ‘Variables Problem’

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Woodward ( [2003] ), has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt, though poorly understood, hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations—of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology, and economics—are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this article to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal–explanatory scheme, as presently formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. 1 Introduction 2 The Interventionist Picture 2.1 Interventionist type causation 2.2 Interventionist actual causation and event explanation 3 Explanatory Comparisons 4 Proportionality to the Rescue? 5 Exhaustivity to the Rescue? 6 Stability to the Rescue? 7 Pointing Towards a Solution