Explanatory Exclusion and the Status of Special Scientific Explanations

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Abstract

Jaegwon Kim has long defended his principle of explanatory exclusion, which states that there can be no more than a single complete and independent explanation of any one event” (1988, p. 233). He has also argued that the exclusion principle places considerable pressure on the legitimacy of psychological explanation. Since human actions are bodily events they must have physical causes, in which case there seems to be an explanation in physical terms for every action. According to the exclusion principle such physical explanations pre-empt psychological ones, especially when the mental properties appealed to in the latter cannot be reduced to the physical properties operative in the former. The implications of Kim’s argument reach well beyond the limits of the philosophy of mind. Historically it has been thought that all of the “special sciences,” such as psychology, economics and sociology employ concepts that are not reducible to physical concepts. This means that Kim’s argument threatens the legitimacy of explanations offered not only by psychology, but economic and sociological explanations as well. My aim in this paper is to provide a means of blocking Kim’s argument by attacking his assumptions about the epistemology of explaining.