Counterfactuals and explanation
Despite my frequent criticism of the everyday counterfactual conditionals that folks like to assert, I’m not against counterfactual conditionals as such. Indeed, in the preface to my book, I say this: I wouldn’t have written the book if determinism weren’t widely misunderstood and denied. That counterfactual conditional is true and perfectly consistent with determinism.
Furthermore, my writing the book was necessitated by conditions that go back forever. Therefore, if I hadn’t written the book, the universe eons ago would have been different. How different? So different that almost certainly the human species would never have come to exist. Thus, I wouldn’t have existed at all if I hadn’t written the book ‒ a second counterfactual conditional that determinists should accept.
But that conditional, while true, doesn’t explain why I wrote the book. I didn’t write the book in order to bring about my own existence! Rather, it’s the first conditional that explains why: I wrote the book because I felt that too many people misunderstand determinism or deny it for bad reasons. The explanation has to do with my motivations at the time, not with the fact that my birth depended on conditions in the universe eons ago. Explanations work because of pragmatic, interest-related factors such as relevance. Given our interests, citing my motivations is more relevant in explaining why I wrote the book than citing conditions in the prehistoric universe.
Some true counterfactual conditionals provide satisfying explanations. Others don’t. Whether an explanation succeeds depends on the interests of the explanation-seeker.
