ELLMM/Linguistics: Kaidi Pan (Yale)

This is a joint event with the Semantics Reading Group in the Linguistics Department.

Location: 37 Hillhouse Ave, Room Go8

Title: A Theory of Why Questions

Abstract: 

From Leibniz’s PSR to Hempel’s deductive-nomological model, philosophers have long suspected that explanation involves a form of necessity: to explain a fact is to show that it could not have been otherwise. Yet this intuition has resisted precise formulation, and contemporary philosophy of science has largely retreated from it, preferring pluralistic accounts that treat causal, probabilistic, contrastive explanations, etc., as irreducibly distinct. This paper argues that the necessitarian intuition was right, and that the path to vindicating it runs through an unexpected source: the semantic structure of explanatory inquiries themselves – what do we mean when we ask why. 

I argue that the logical form of why questions contains a hidden modal structure – one that simultaneously explains three puzzling linguistic features that have resisted a unified semantic treatment of why questions with other wh questions: their extraordinary context-sensitivity, the robustly modal character of their canonical because-conditional answers, and their truth-conditional sensitivity to prosodic focus. This Hidden Modal View accounts for what previous approaches by Bromberger and van Fraassen could only partially capture, and connects the semantics of why questions to a principled metaphysical account of what explanatory answers are. 

The philosophical payoff is significant. If the Hidden Modal View is correct, the apparent diversity of explanatory forms – causal, nomological, probablistics, teleological – reflects not a diversity of brute explanatory relations but a diversity of principly structured modal backgrounds. Explanatory Pluralism, on this view, is simply Modal Contextualism. The old necessitarian intuition survives, but with a contextualist twist: explanation is necessitation, always and only, in context.