The Causal-Ontological View of Scientific Theory and Explanation

Scientific explanation is frequently distinguished from description and prediction, yet the basis of that distinction remains contested. This paper introduces the causal-ontological view of scientific theories, a foundational account according to which scientific explanation is necessarily causal and the explanatory content of a scientific theory resides fundamentally in the causal organisation of its theoretical ontology. Drawing on Kant’s account of the conditions and limits of human intelligibility, Salmon’s causal conception of explanation, van Fraassen’s empiricist resistance to unwarranted metaphysical inference, and contemporary interventionist and structural causal approaches associated with Woodward and Pearl, the paper develops an empirically constrained conception of scientific theory. On this view, theoretical ontology specifies the constructs through which a scientific domain is represented, mathematics may participate in constituting and formalising those constructs and their relations, and causal structure provides their explanatory organisation. Description, prediction, and explanation are therefore treated as distinct epistemic functions, while mathematics may contribute to each. Mathematical derivability and predictive success may be substantial without constituting explanation. The central thesis of the causal-ontological view is consequently that, within scientific inquiry, without causation there is no scientific explanation.