Aspects of Non-Causal Explanation

Type: 
Budapest colloquium talks
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Zrinyi u. 14
Room: 
412
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

The goal of this talk is to defend a monist framework for causal and non-causal explanations - a counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE). According to the CTE, both causal and non-causal explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans. I argue that (1) the CTE is applicable to paradigmatic examples of non-causal explanations, and that (2) the CTE has a surprising consequence regarding the asymmetry of explanations.