Abstract

This chapter presents the methodology and results of the experiments we ran to investigate people’s judgements about the conditions under which a proposition of the form ⌜x _because_ y⌝ is true or is an explanation. First, the chapter looks to the literature investigating judgements about causal explanation, and to philosophers’ judgements about metaphysical explanation, to generate hypotheses. It emerges that people are inclined to judge that ⌜x _because_ y⌝ is true precisely when it’s an explanation, there is evidence of context-sensitivity, and there is surprising evidence that people judge that there can be symmetrical everyday metaphysical explanations. Armed with this information, the chapter revisits the desiderata from chapter 2 to fill in some missing empirical details.