Erkenntnis

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00134-1

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through

Laws

Gustavo A. Castañon1 

Received: 12 December 2017 / Accepted: 27 May 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
‘Possibilist Explanation’ is a promising account of scientific explanation which
avoids the familiar problems of “how-possibly explanations”. It explains an event
by showing how-actually it was epistemically possible, instead of why it was epis-
temically necessary. Its explanandum is the epistemic possibility of an actual event
previously considered epistemically impossible. To define PE, two new concepts are
introduced: ‘permissive condition’ and ‘possibilist law’. A permissive condition for
an event is something that does not entail the event itself, but a necessary condi-
tion for it. A ‘Possibilist Law’ is a kind of scientific law that predicts that in the
absence of a necessary condition N, the event E is not possible. Both PE and PL are
legitimate and neglected parts of scientific knowledge and are especially suitable for
human sciences.

1 Introduction

Whether under a covering-law (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948) or causal-mechani-

cal (Woodward 2003; Craver 2007) framework, it is usually assumed that offering
a complete scientific explanation of an event requires sufficiently demonstrating its
occurrence, or at least, giving good grounds to expect it to have occurred. In other
words, from this view explaining would only be explaining why-necessarily.
Nevertheless, in ordinary life, sometimes we are not even interested in the suf-
ficient cause of a phenomenon, only in some necessary one. This goes the same way
in science. When it does, explaining is explaining how-possibly: to show how some-
thing that seemed impossible or unexpected in certain circumstances (for those who
demand the explanation) was epistemically possible (consistent with our background
knowledge), instead of showing why it must have occurred.
Dray (1954) identified how-possibly explanations (HPE) for the first time, and
their widespread use in history, as an alternative to the deductive-nomological model

* Gustavo A. Castañon
gustavocastanon@hotmail.com
1
Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil

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 G. A. Castañon

(DNM). Nevertheless, nowadays their use is not limited to this field. It also has an
explanatory role in evolutionary biology (O’Hara 1988; Brandon 1990; Resnik
1991; Forber 2010; Persson 2012), political science (Goertz and Starr 2003), econ-
omy (Grüne-Yanoff 2009) and even some in quantum computation (Cuffaro 2015).
Let’s consider here Dray’s (1954) classic example. It is a baseball game broadcast
by radio where the announcer suddenly says that a player has just caught a ball about
twenty feet above the field. Here are his words (Dray 1957, 157): “It’s a long fly ball
to centre field, and it’s going to hit high up on the fence. The centre fielder’s back
he’s under it, he’s caught it, and the batter is out”. How could he have done it? A
Dray-style HPE might contend that this was possible because there was a platform
for the scoreboard and the player climbed the stairs to get the ball. I.e., the player
being on the platform made the event epistemically possible, though not necessary.
Throughout the literature, two major criticisms (Reiner 1993) were directed to
Dray’s account of HPE. The first and most common was posed in different ways by
Passmore (1958), Strawson (1959), Dietz (1970) and Reydon (2012). They argue
that Dray’s HPE may be subsumed under the logical form of a deductive argument
which relies on laws of nature, and therefore makes it a special case of DNM.
This is a criticism because Dray believed (1954, 1957, 1968) that since HPEs do
not seek to establish why an event must have occurred, they do not need to rely on
laws of nature. I think he was wrong on this and here I am going to show that either
his account has a hidden deductive-nomological model (DNM) structure or it does
not work. By showing exactly which structure and kind of law an HPE of the kind
that Dray was looking for has to have, which is not a sufficient or a probabilistic one,
I end up presenting a more complete HPE and an advance on our understanding of
the topic, even if one continues to think that implicit reliance on laws (which Dray
denies) is enough for an adequate explanation.
The second major criticism is the one pointed out by Reiner (1993), and pro-
poses that Dray’s HPE wrongly takes one of several conditions P that make an event
E possible, to be a necessary condition for E. As we are going to see in Sect.  4,
pointing out these particular conditions as necessary ones is a mistake, because at
best each one is, separately considered, one of several conditions that can make the
event E possible. As I am going to show, these conditions are what I call permissive
conditions.
Assuming explanatory pluralism, my main objective in this paper is to present
possibilist explanation (PE), a new account of how-possibly explanation (HPE) for-
malised into a covering law argument that fixes the flaws in Dray’s standard view.
To do this, I have to introduce the concepts of permissive condition and possibilist
law (PL). I will show how a self-alleged explanation without laws not only presup-
poses a law but only becomes complete when this law is revealed.
My motivation to do so is the belief that laws have a fundamental explanatory
role. This could be considered a problem itself since most contemporary authors
have abandoned this view (Cartwright 1983, 1999; Woodward 2003). However, I do
not mean by this that causal-mechanical explanations are incorrect or inferior expla-
nations. What I believe is that any link of the causal chain in a mechanistic explana-
tion, to be entirely explicative, presupposes a law, even if this law is nothing more
than an expression of a causal power (capacity) of a component of this chain.

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

What I call possibilism seems to be entirely compatible with a causal-mechanical

explanation. Nevertheless, I am not going to enter here into the relationship between
law-based and causal-mechanical explanations. This more fundamental debate goes
beyond the scope of the present article and does not interfere with my argument, which
is why it should be addressed in another paper.
Therefore, this paper takes as its starting point both Dray’s original account and a
law-based view of explanation, as an argumentative strategy to present not only what
seems to be hidden in Dray’s model, but also possibilist knowledge in a clear and for-
malized way.
Possibilist explanations are called for whenever the event E is taken to be surpris-
ing or seemingly (epistemically) impossible, i.e. when E is taken to defy our scientific
understanding. By specifying what I call a possibilist law (PL) and a permissive condi-
tion (PC), it becomes no longer surprising or “impossible” that E had been the case. A
PL identifies a necessary condition (N) for an event E to have occurred. A permissive
condition identifies a particular circumstance P which enables the satisfaction of N in
the context of E.
To accomplish the objective of this paper, the argument is divided into several sec-
tions. In Sect.  2, I briefly present a quick historical review of kinds of how-possibly
explanations, comparing and differentiating between my own PE account and these
previous forms of HPEs.
In Sect.  3, I formalise PE, showing how it solves Dray’s model flaws. To do this
properly, I also define the two new concepts mentioned above, which are absent in pre-
vious versions of HPE: the permissive condition and the possibilist law. After that, I
present a definition of PE specifying the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for
it. In doing so, I define a new kind of HPE, with a new explanandum, a new kind of
condition, a new kind of law, and a DNM structure.
In Sect. 4, I explore the formal definition of possibilist law presented in Sect. 3. A
formalisation of the predictive structure of this kind of law is shown, as well as some
examples of PLs and how they are especially fitted for human sciences.
In Sect. 5, I present a more detailed analysis of PE, providing some special examples
of it which show how it can be applied to just unexpected events or even to ordinary
events in human sciences.
In Sect. 6, I try to advance some possible criticism of PEs, which are those of its
explanatory sufficiency, of its supposed incompleteness, and of the number of neces-
sary conditions for any phenomenon.
Finally, I shall conclude that these kinds of explanation and law are expressions of a
neglected dimension of human knowledge, that I call possibilist, distinct from sufficient
or probabilistic knowledge. Possibilist knowledge is particularly useful for human sci-
ences because, in the final analysis, the laws that sufficiently determine human behav-
iour (if there were any) are so amazingly complex that we may not even be able to
understand them.

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2 Some History: Different Kinds of How‑Possibly Explanations

To make this puzzling subject easier for the reader, I shall present here a very
brief historical review of the different versions of HPEs. This also has the func-
tion of illustrating, at a glance, my own account of HPE by comparing it to these
previous versions. Some other contrasts with HPEs are in the context of the
causal-mechanical framework. However, although of interest to HPEs, the CM
framework itself is outside the scope of this work. A more detailed summary of
all these accounts is a job for a future paper.
There are two major kinds of alternative explanations to HPEs: why-necessar-
ily explanations and how-actually ones. In fact, what we call how-possibly expla-
nations are basically two different things: one thing when in opposition to why-
necessarily ones, and another in opposition to how-actually ones.
When one defines an HPE in opposition to why-necessarily explanations, as
did Dray (1957), it seeks to explain how some event, epistemically impossible at
first sight, was actually possible. Why-necessarily explanation, in turn, explains
why some event that actually happened was necessary. In both cases, we are deal-
ing with what Bokulich (2014) now calls how-actually explanations, in other
words, explanations about what, in fact, has happened.
Therefore, what Bokulich (2014) calls a how-possibly explanation is differ-
ent from Dray’s conception. To her (following Brandon 1990), a how-possibly
explanation just gives a potential explanation, a suitable answer to some scien-
tific problem that is not ruled out by known facts. It may be either a competi-
tor hypothesis or a hypothetical model. In this sense, an HPE does not pick out
the actual mechanism, law or condition that has enabled the event that actually
occurred.
To sum up, in Dray’s classic account a how-possibly explanation is opposed
to a why-necessarily one. It explains by showing that the event that has seemed
epistemically impossible in some circumstances was actually epistemically possi-
ble. It intends to offer, as the DNM also does, an actual explanation of an actual
event.
In Bokulich’s sense, a how-possibly explanation is opposed to a how-actually
one. It explains by simply presenting a model that is a possible answer to how
some real mechanism works. It is a possible explanation of an actual event.
It is this latter sense of HPE that Reydon (2012) calls “possible explanation”. It
has an important field of application in evolutionary biology, where it tries to show
that a particular biological characteristic has a possible explanation in a particular
evolutionary context. Brandon (1990) is the one who established this speculative
sense of HPEs in this field. For him, “a how-possibly explanation is one where one
or more of the explanatory conditions are speculatively postulated” (1990, 183).
While my own account of PE and Dray’s HPE specify (not speculate on) some ini-
tial conditions that explain that the event was possible, Brandon (1990) and evolu-
tionary biologists speculate about these conditions (Forber 2010, 36).
Forber (2010) presented another account of “possible explanations” in evo-
lutionary biology which distinguishes between global and local how-possibly

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

explanations. The global how-possibly explanation focuses on idealized popula-

tions and on how some potential process could produce evolutionary changes in
it. It is a theoretical exploration of abstract models. The local how-possibly expla-
nation shows how “some known process produce, in a way consistent with the
local information set for a real population, an observed evolutionary outcome or
pattern” (p. 34). It is an application of models to real biological systems.
His general HPE model goes like this. If we know that a population P (idealized
or real) has a set S of properties (idealized or real) and that there is an evolutionary
model M that implies a process P having a probability, given S, greater than zero
to produce the explanandum, then we have an HPE. It is the explanation of some
characteristic x in a population, that specifies a set of high-level constraints and of
variable parameters, simulating through computation possible processes by which
this population could have obtained x. Forber deduces possibility from probability,
offering, as he says, new kinds of “just-so stories”. His account seeks to identify
possible necessary or sufficient conditions that could have led to some specific out-
come, determining the set of candidate explanations that should be considered in
further investigations or confirmation trials. We have here a possible explanation for
the possibility of a possible (global HPE) or an actual (local HPE) event.
Something similar to Forber’s global how-possibly is found in another kind of
HPE used in economics, which Grüne-Yanoff (2009) calls a “minimal economic
model” (MEM). This kind of HPE account does not satisfy world-linking condi-
tions such as having a real explanandum, or the resemblance of parts or adherence to
supposed natural laws. It seeks only to offer a vision of how it would be possible to
produce an outcome that presently is considered impossible. In other words, MEMs
aim is to provide a possible explanation of a possible event.
Finally, I should address Persson’s (2012) account. He defends the existence of a
third kind of HPE, that he calls “ontic how-possibly explanations” (p. 275), distinct
from how-actually (Dray’s) and possible (Brandon’s) explanations. To him, this kind
of HPE (he is a pluralist) is an incomplete causal explanation, which establishes the
existence of a partial mechanism by which the explanandum was in fact generated. It
is, in his words, a “partial how-explanation of X” (p. 275). As his example about the
symbiosis between termites and their intestinal protozoa illustrates, the finding of
an empirically verified part of the mechanism which produces X makes his account
distinct from possible explanations.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that it can be considered part of Dray’s “family” of
HPEs (as can mine). It is both a how-possibly and a how-actually explanation. The
major differences are that Dray’s model aims to be a complete explanation for how
some event was possible, and Persson’s model aims to be an incomplete explanation
for why some event was necessary, revealing part of a mechanism—that satisfy of
what I call a permissive, a necessary or a sufficient condition—without which the
explanandum would not have happened. This part of the mechanism, despite hav-
ing some empirical support, has no complete empirical support connecting it into a
complete mechanism that necessarily produces the explanandum. Moreover, in Pers-
son’s account, the explanandum does not need to seem epistemically impossible just
still unexplained. In other words, it is an incomplete actual explanation of an actual
event.

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The model of explanation that we are now going to analyze is in several ways dif-
ferent from all the HPE models considered above. It is both a how-possibly model
in Dray’s sense and a how-actually model in Bokulich’s sense. It is not a possible
explanation. It is different from Persson’s model because it is a complete rather than
incomplete explanation for the possibility of an event (though not for its necessity).
Moreover, it is a fully formalized DN explanation, not an intuitive causal-mechan-
ical one, which introduces new concepts to the HPE debate. My account also fixes
Dray’s version of HPE by combining it with some qualities of the DNM. It identifies
the actual kind of law of nature that was implicit in Dray’s HPE, as well as a kind
of condition previously misidentified in it. Finally, PE also changes the nature of its
explanandum. As such this form of explanation doesn’t fit into any of the previous
HPEs categories, thus I will baptize it with a new term, and I have chosen the for-
gotten word ‘possibilist’. Like Dray’s HPE, possibilist explanation (PE) intends to
explain how an actual event was epistemically possible, but it is also a covering-law
explanation. It aims to offer a complete actual explanation of the possibility of an
actual event.

3 Possibilist Explanation

A PE is a scientific explanation demanded when an event E is supposedly epistemi-

cally impossible in a context S, and yet it is the case that E (There is no oxygen in an
insulated chamber, and yet there is a combustion in it). It states the (permissive and
necessary) conditions that made the event E epistemically possible (e.g. there was a
flaw in the insulation, and therefore there was oxygen in the chamber), rather than
the ones that made it epistemically necessary. PE does not explain the event E, but
the epistemic possibility of the event E through a valid deductive argument based on
laws of nature. This argument has the general form of “given the laws and generali-
sations X, Y and Z, and the (not posterior in time) particular conditions x, y and z; it
follows that E was epistemically possible”.
Let’s continue to work with Dray’s (1954) classic example to show how PE spells
out the laws or generalisations implicitly assumed by his explanation. A PE would
explain the possibility of the catch by stating that:

1′) having a ball within reach of a hand is a necessary condition (N) for x catching it
(E);
2′) in the context S, x being on the scoreboard platform that is in the trajectory of
the ball is a permissive condition (P) that lets player x have the ball within reach
of his hand (N);
3′) the player employed the means of being on the platform (P(A));
4′) therefore the ball was within reach of his hand (N(A)) and;
5′) therefore player x catching the ball was possible (◊ Ex).

The structure of a PE:

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

‘A’ being a particular action or event that happened in S

1) ∀x (Nx ↔ ◊ Ex) (possibilist law)

2) In S, P(A) → N(A) (in a context S)
3) In S, P(A) (P is a permissive condition)
4) ∴N(A) (N is a necessary condition)
5) ∴◊ Ex

I have used here the new concept of “permissive condition” without previous def-
inition. Now I must introduce it. As we saw previously, Dray’s HPE (Reiner 1993)
wrongly takes one of several conditions P that can make an event E possible, to be
a necessary condition for E. Being on the platform is not a necessary condition to
catch the ball. Having it within reach of a hand is. Pointing out particular conditions
as necessary ones is a mistake, because at best each one is, separately considered
(the platform), one of several conditions (a light tower climbed, a helicopter hoisting
the player, flying in a flight propulsion device, etc.) that can make possible the event
E (catching the ball). These several events do not cause E nor even directly make it
possible. What they do is to entail the actual necessary condition for E: having the
ball within reach of a hand. For this reason, I call them permissive conditions.
To put it directly: a permissive condition P for an event E is a sufficient but not
necessary condition for an actual necessary condition N for E (P → N). In other
words, a permissive condition for an event is something that does not entail the
event itself, but a necessary condition for it. A permissive condition only enables
E in a given context S (climbing the platform can only enable E if it is in its trajec-
tory), it is an event among others (­P1, ­P2, ­P3…) which makes another event E pos-
sible, but not necessary ((P → ◊E) ˄ ◊(P ˄¬E) ˄ ◊(¬P ˄ E)). Climbing the platform
makes it possible to catch the ball (P → ◊E), but it is possible that the player does
climb the platform and fails to catch the ball (◊(P ˄¬E)), as much as it is possible
that he does not climb the platform but is hoisted by a helicopter and does catch the
ball (◊(¬P ˄ E)).
The introduction of the concept of permissive condition facilitates the strict use
of the term ‘necessary condition’ to E (E → N), avoiding its usual misuse to refer
to permissive, inus (Mackie 1980) and even “probabilistic necessary” conditions
(Goertz and Starr 2003).
The condition N (having the ball within reach of his hand) caused by P is the real
necessary (but not sufficient) condition for E, and it is not context-dependent. If the
player caught the ball, then, in every possible world ruled by the same laws as ours,
it was within reach of his hand (E → N). If it was not within reach of his hand, then
he could not have caught the ball (¬N → ¬E). However, he could have had the ball
within reach and yet have failed to catch it (◊(N ˄¬E)).
Now, using the concept of permissive condition (P), we can specify the necessary
and jointly sufficient conditions for a possibilist explanation (PE):

(a) its explanandum must be a proposition that is a logical consequence of the

explanans;

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(b) its explanans must have at least one proposition L that describes a law or gener-
alisation that states a necessary condition N for the event E;
(c) the laws and generalisations in its explanans must be used in the deduction;
(d) its explanans propositions either generates predictions that must be capable of
test or are descriptions of observations;
(e) its explanans has only corroborated propositions;
(f) its explanans has at least one proposition which describes a permissive condition
P for E, which did not happen in a moment posterior to explanandum;
(g) its explanans has at least one proposition which describes an event e’ that satis-
fies a necessary condition N for E, and e’ takes place at a certain time t’ which
is either earlier than t or identical to t;
(h) its explanandum is a proposition which describes the epistemic possibility of
event E which happened at moment t.

4 Possibilist Law

The other concept used here without previous definition was possibilist law. PL is
the type of law used in PEs and could be the only one possible in human sciences
besides the comparative ceteris paribus laws (Rupert 2008). Instead of stating a suf-
ficient condition, i.e. “if x then y happens”, it has the form: “if and only if x then y
can happen”, which can also be stated as “if x then y can happen; and if not x then
y cannot happen”. Of course, the second conjunct entails: “if not x than y does not
happen”.
One might immediately wonder: “how could we predict a possibility?” This
seems to be counterintuitive, as whatever goes on in the presence of x is covered by
the “prediction”. No counterfactual seems to be supported. Suppose we state that
only in the presence of oxygen can combustion exist. If in the presence of oxygen,
we have either combustion or no combustion, the sentence is corroborated. Never-
theless, if we read the biconditional as a conjunction, it is the second part of the
conjunction (∀x ((Nx → ◊Ex) ˄ (¬Nx → ¬Ex))) which makes the difference. In
fact, what a PL predicts that can be tested is not the possibility of something, but
the impossibility of the occurrence of something without its necessary condition
(impossibility of combustion without oxygen). The structure of a PL prediction is:

1) ∀x (Nx ↔ ◊ Ex) (possibilist law)

2) ¬Nx (there is no necessary condition satisfied)
3) ∴¬◊Ex (there is no possibility of the effect)

PL is a scientific law because the eventual occurrence of an effect without its

necessary condition falsifies a law. A PL, in practice, does not predict that x makes y
possible (which does not predict anything falsifiable: “oxygen allows combustion”).
The structure of a falsification is: (a) PL1: “If there is no N (oxygen), there is no E
(combustion)”; (b) It is the case that we have E (combustion) without N (in a cham-
ber with no oxygen); (c) Therefore, PL1 is falsified.

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

A PL is at base merely a specification of a necessary condition of some kind of

event. This by itself does not seem all that novel. What is novel here is considering
such specifications as laws of nature. In fact, they are not just laws, but strict laws,
probably, the only kind of actual strict laws in the universe.
We should consider such specifications of necessary conditions as laws because
they are logically contingent universal propositions. Laws have traditionally been
considered as relating an antecedent consisting of a set of descriptions of given
(background) conditions ­(C1) plus a description of one kind of event ­(E1) with a
consequent consisting of a description of another kind of event (­ E2). This relation is
such as to guarantee that if the (background) conditions ­C1 and the event ­E1 occur,
the event E­ 2 must occur. Therefore, the real form of what such a law would be is ‘(C1
& ­E1) → E2’. As we may know very well, this is practically unrealizable (Cartwright
1983). To set the sufficient conditions to E ­ 2, we would have to be able to include and
discriminate, in the (background) conditions C ­ 1, all (necessary) conditions whose
presence or absence could prevent the occurrence of ­E2.
A PL has no such a problem, because the only thing that it predicts, in practice,
is the impossibility of E ­ 2. Moreover, it does this by identifying only one actual nec-
essary condition ­P1 and transforming its negation (¬N1) into the entire antecedent,
as well as the negation of the event E ­ 2 into the consequent. No clauses. A real and
practical strict law, predictive, falsifiable, and ready to be used by those who want to
prevent, not to induce, some event.
How often can we expect to find PLs in nature? An actual necessary condition
may appear a difficult thing to find, but in fact, it is a very easy one. Let’s look at the
concept of necessary condition by considering Mackie’s (1980) model.
A necessary and sufficient condition for an event E2 (lighting a candle) should be
a conditional in which the antecedent is a complex disjunction of conjunctions (light
a match and touch it on the candle’s wick; put a lens under the sun and concentrate
its rays on the candle’s wick; etc.), each conjunction representing a condition that
is sufficient but not necessary for E2. This is the case because there are, usually,
several ways to cause an event (lighting a match and touching it on a candle’s wick
is sufficient to light it, but not necessary because I can also do this by using a lens, a
gun, a torch, etc.). These several forms make impossible a “sufficient general law of
lighting a candle”, but not a PL of it.
An actual necessary condition N for E2 can be found in two ways. First, it can
be a non-redundant part of all conjunctions that are minimal sufficient conditions
for E2 (heating the candle wick to a temperature sufficient for combustion). Second,
it can be a (background) condition that was hidden in the “causal field” (the pres-
ence of oxygen). Mackie (1980) calls “causal field” the entire field of conditions
that naturally are present in the context of E2, which are expected to stay unchanged
(that there is the world, its typical environment, oxygen, etc.). These background
assumptions (conditions) are in a strict sense, parts of the cause of E2 but remain
unconsidered for pragmatic reasons.
Therefore, PLs are abundant in nature. What is not so easy to find is a PL that is
not trivial, and that offers insightful predictions. Even so, while it may be trivial to
say that if there is no oxygen, then there is no flame, this can still be used to avoid
combustion.

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An obvious objection to the feasibility of an experimental test of a PL would be

that since the event E cannot be guaranteed by the occurrence of the necessary con-
dition N, we cannot cause it in the laboratory, simply because the PL doesn’t say
how to do this. In other words: how do we produce E if we do not have sufficient
conditions to cause it?
Well, we do not need to. I should point out two interesting features of PL here.
First, that any observation of E in the absence of N falsifies a PL, without the need
of an experiment. PLs are not ceteris paribus laws. It could be a great tool for social
sciences since they already cannot reproduce the social phenomena that they inves-
tigate. PLs offer predictions that could be falsified without experimentation, with a
single and dependable observation. Consider the famous prediction of Marx that no
social order ever disappears before all its productive forces have been developed. If
we interpret this generalisation as a possibilist law, only one occurrence of a revolu-
tion in an agricultural country in the industrial era would have been sufficient to fal-
sify it. Goertz (2012) believes that there is plenty of what he calls “descriptive causal
generalisations” in social sciences, and that the most common of these describes
necessary conditions for an event. What prevents many social scientists from pre-
senting these strong generalisations as laws, he thinks, is the strategy of protecting
their findings from a counterexample. He compiled elsewhere (Goertz 2003) a list
of 150 necessary condition hypotheses in history, sociology, political science and
economy, several of which could be considered PL candidates. One example is the
generalisation of the “democratic peace”, which can be stated in a possibilist form:
“If none of two states is authoritarian, a war between them is impossible”.
Second, psychology, finally, would have an advantage over the other sciences on
this. Indeed, we can promote a psychological experiment testing PLs. We remove N
from antecedent conditions and ask the subjects to exhibit behaviour E. We offer a
reward. If they fail to do E, we have a good reason to consider the law corroborated.
By speculating, for example, that a preserved temporal lobe is a necessary condition
(not sufficient) for the emission of verbal behaviour, we could test the generalisation
by subjecting people to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) inhibiting the area
and offering rewards to speak. In other words, in psychology, we have the only study
object that we can persuade to try to accomplish E when we are suppressing an N.
Every sub-discipline of psychology has examples of nontrivial PL candidates. It
is important to stress here that what I am claiming is that these laws are actually
present in psychological life, and are, therefore, present in theories and models all
through the history of psychology, although they have not been formalised in the
discipline. Also, I think that they have not been formalised because we have not
been looking for them.
Let us see some examples in classical works of the discipline. In developmental
psychology, we could easily say that the mastering of a logically more fundamental
cognitive structure or concepts is a necessary condition for mastering more complex
structures (the mastering of the concept of volume and its relation to weight requires
the mastering of the concepts of substance density, compression and decompression
of matter; Piaget and Inhelder 1941, pp. 130–133). In the psychology of personal-
ity, there are personality traits or kinds of historical events that seem to be neces-
sary for the emergence of extraordinary features such as creativity or leadership (the

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

coherence between assumed narrative and history of life as a necessary condition for
leadership, Gardner and Laskin 1995, pp. 37). In neuroscience, we can say that cer-
tain levels of certain neurotransmitters are necessary conditions for regular behav-
iour (a minimum level of dopamine in the basal ganglia is a necessary condition for
fine motor control; Carlsson et al. 1958) or that a bilaterally severed hippocampus
makes registration of new explicit memories impossible (Scoville and Milner 1957).
In the psychology of perception, we know that the correct perception of distance is
necessary to the correct perception of size (Rock 1984, p. 156). In the psychology of
memory, we can say that the regular functioning of the phonological loop is neces-
sary to learn new words (Baddeley et al. 1998). And the list goes on.
Note that none of these PL candidates is trivial and that the predictions they make
are all useful. Knowing density and compression is not a sufficient condition for
the complete understanding of volume, but we know that we must learn them first,
to make the learning of volume possible. The coherence between an assumed nar-
rative and your history of life will not make you a Moses, but the lack of it will
prevent you from being a general leader. A severed hippocampus will restrict your
liberty and your memory, but not determine it: what you want to remember from
your childhood is up to you.
Despite all that, I should simply recognize that current neuroscientific practice
do not use laws in its general picture. However, I think this may be, in part, a con-
sequence of the neuroscientists’ lack of consciousness of PLs, PEs, permissive
conditions and the possibilist framework. Presently, we are not looking for laws in
neuroscience.
Now it is time to stress here the difference between possibilist and probabilistic
laws since neither is sufficient to predict the occurrence of a particular event. At first
glance it may appear that probabilistic laws predict more than possibilist ones and
that PLs can be deduced from them. Well, this depends on what kind of probabilis-
tic law we have, and on the kind of prediction we are looking for. A sufficient law
predicts the occurrence of an event. A probabilistic law predicts the probability of
its occurrence. A possibilist law predicts, strictly speaking, the non-occurrence of
an event, something that a probabilistic law cannot do. For example, we can say that
for a pregnant woman, a necessary condition for having a blue-eyed child is the pos-
session of at least one recessive gene of blue eyes. A proper PL in such a case is “If
A has no recessive gene B, she will have no blue-eyed child”. In other words, here
we can have a strict prediction that as she has no recessive gene B, her child will not
have blue eyes.
Let us compare this with a probabilistic functional law that shows how the alco-
hol level in a driver’s blood raises the rate of car accidents. It would predict the
probability of having an accident in the next twenty minutes given a certain level
of alcohol in the driver’s blood. However, it does not predict the impossibility of
an accident in the absence of alcohol in the blood. In such a case, a real necessary
condition for a car crash should be driving a car, for example. The alcohol level also
cannot cause a necessary condition, so, it is not a permissive condition either. On the
other hand, with two platforms in the trajectory of the ball, a player cannot escalate
both to double his chances of catching the ball. But if someone raises the alcohol
level in the blood, it will increase the chances of an accident. That is why I call these

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 G. A. Castañon

kinds of inus conditions contributory conditions, which increases the likelihood of E

in a context S, but are not necessary conditions to E.
To sum up, usually, these two kinds of laws describe the causal influences of
two very different kinds of condition: the necessary, which teach us how to avoid a
kind of event, and the contributory, that teach us how to improve the chances of it
happening.

5 Discussion and Special Examples: Possibilist Explanations

There are three kinds of events that could demand a PE. The first are the supposedly
epistemically impossible ones. The second are the unusual ones. The third are those
for which no sufficient causes can ever be scientifically determined. Let us briefly
consider again the first kind.
The supposedly epistemically impossible events are of two basic types. First, the
event of the absence of an effect in the face of its supposed sufficient condition (its
absence was supposedly epistemically impossible). To illustrate, we can consider the
example of a stone that is dropped from the fifth floor but fails to touch the ground,
and instead stays floating above it. Second, the event of the presence of an effect in
the face of the apparent absence of one of its necessary conditions (its occurrence
was supposedly epistemically impossible), like the the catch in the baseball game.
The explanation of the second type was already described. However, in the first
type, an explanation of a supposedly impossible event implies changes in the sup-
posed strict law. If there is any causal interaction that can prevent the effect from
happening, we would have to transform it into a ceteris paribus law (CPL), a proba-
bilistic or even a possibilist law. Even so, an explanation of the possibility of the
event could be offered pointing out which causal influence did not stay unchanged or
absent (CPL), or was probabilistically insignificant but happened (probabilistic) or
yet which unknown (till now) necessary condition was not satisfied.
Since all the laws of nature, outside of physics (or even in physics, according to
Cartwright 1983), are ceteris paribus, they all provide predictions that are, funda-
mentally, possibilist. In fact, CPLs only make conditional predictions, i.e., in a strict
sense, they only predict that, given x, the event y is possible, being necessary only if
certain (background) conditions C (uncontrolled) be held constant or absent. When
an event that is expected under a ceteris paribus law does not obtain, to explain
how it was possible, we have to show which (background) condition did not stay
unchanged or absent.
For example, how could it have been the case that a driver that had drunk 200 ml
of vodka did not have her reflexes lowered? A PE could say that, given some gen-
eralisation which predicts the effect caused by a particular psychotropic, the fact
that the driver had ingested this drug to increase her reflexes before driving made it
possible.
Unusual events also demand PEs besides causal or DN explanations. Let us
distinguish those two demands in the same unusual event. Suppose that an explo-
sion occurs in a residential flat when Michel strikes a match to light his cigarette.
Since it is normal for people to be striking matches and lighting cigarettes in a

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

flat, we are not interested in what sufficiently caused the explosion, but in what
made it possible. However, knowing about a gas leak in his insulated and refrig-
erated flat in a summer day in Rio (plus a PL about the necessary concentra-
tion of gas for the possibility of an explosion) would offer us a PE of the event.
Since a gas leak is uncommon and should not occur, someone probably would
say that the blast was caused by the presence of a quantity of gas rather than by
Michel lighting his cigarette. However, strictly speaking, the leak of gas was a
permissive condition that has caused the necessary condition (for an explosion)
of a given concentration of gas. If we want a complete causal or DN explanation
of the event, we should add the striking of a match to it. But in this case, this just
happens to be uninteresting.
Picture how we could apply this format in history, the target of Dray’s concerns.
We would explain human beings going to the moon in the sixties by showing that
the discovery of certain physical laws and certain improvements in aerospace engi-
neering made the event possible. It was so by solving the lack of certain knowledge
and technology that was impeditive of manned space flights a few years before. Of
course, we could not determine the long chain of decisions and contingencies that
sufficiently determined the event. However, a PE does not need to determine all the
necessary conditions, laws and contingent facts for it. It just needs to (1) identify the
falsifiable and corroborated law that had been apparently violated, and, (2) find the
occurring permissive condition that caused the necessary condition that had been
considered absent. I.e., a PE has to show what explains the epistemic possibility of
the phenomenon at stake.
As we can see, even if there is no presumption of epistemic impossibility, a PE
can be used to explain events that are just unusual. In the space flight case, it can be
done by demonstrating all of the permissive and relevant necessary conditions to
which we have access since we cannot show the entire chain of causal factors that
sufficiently caused the event. Of course, the more permissive and necessary satisfied
conditions known, the more comprehensive the explanation is. PEs are not always
complete explanations (They are so only when the objective is to explain the pos-
sibility of an event). Nevertheless, they are the kinds we are sometimes interested
in and the ones we can actually obtain completely, because, although a “successful”
DN explanation is complete, it is impossible (at least in human sciences) to obtain.
And the same goes for causal explanations.
Finally, more important than the use of PEs for unusual events is its use for
human events that are just not explicable in a sufficient way. Let us figure out what
could have been done in development psychology, for example. How could Piaget
(1965) have provided a sufficient explanation for a particular behaviour (Event E)
that expresses an understanding of the principle of quantity conservation (the quan-
tity of a thing remains the same regardless of some alteration in its appearance or
form) in a given situation? That is, in fact, impossible. The most that the develop-
mental laws of Piaget could explain is that due to the presence of a particular cogni-
tive structure, such behaviour was possible but not necessary. For example:

(a) For a child, having entered into the preoperational development stage is a neces-
sary condition to control the principle of quantity conservation;

13
 G. A. Castañon

(b) The domain of the principle of identity relies necessarily on the preoperational
stage;
(c) The four-year-old child Julie had shown efficient use of the principle of identity
at the moment T1;
(d) Therefore, Julie was at the preoperational stage of development at T1;
(e) Therefore, it was possible that Julie had presented behaviour that presupposes
control of the principle of quantity conservation at T2 (event E).

Of course, being at the preoperational stage is not the only necessary condition
for the appearance of the quantity conservation principle in a child (the principle of
reversibility, for example, could be another). However, it could rebut in some cases
the presupposition that the child couldn’t have presented such behaviour and it will
be, necessarily, part of the entire explanation about her/his behaviour.
It seems that PEs could be easily coordinated with mechanistic explanations
(Fodor 1991; Wright and Bechtel 2007; Craver 2007) based on capabilities in psy-
chology. If we think of regarding the causal explanation of a behaviour or any case
study in human sciences, it is very common to use the necessary condition causal
approach (Levy and Goertz 2007). In the metaphor of a mechanism as a stable
causal chain, if the mechanism has no redundant way to realise its function in some
“link”, it is a necessary condition factor: break this link, and the chain is broken,
the regular effect is not possible anymore. With a severed hippocampus, one can no
longer register long-term memories. So, if you have only the description of a neces-
sary condition at any link of the chain, the deep explanation of this link is a PE, and
this entire causal explanation explains no more than the possibility of the behaviour
or the event at stake.

6 Discussing Some Possible Criticism on PE

Advocates of causal explanation surely at this point have already asked why an HPE
should need to explicitly rely on laws. Well, it need not. Nevertheless, even though
I have stated in the first section of this article that I am taking Dray’s model and its
law-based competitor only as my starting point here, I do not deny that I share with
logical positivism the belief that scientific explanations should, at least implicitly,
contain laws or generalisations.
However, I would like to stress that the ideas defended here have no commitments
to the logical positivist avoidance of causality. There seems to be nothing precluding
the use of permissive and necessary conditions in a causal-mechanical explanation. I
do not think Woodward (2003) or the entire causal-mechanical approach is commit-
ted to banishing laws or generalisations from scientific explanation at all, especially
the kind of laws, possibilist ones, that I have presented here. But all this discussion
should be object of another paper. Here I merely show that HPEs could be deduc-
tive-nomological explanations (DNEs).
Even so, possibilist explanation can be questioned on many points. I think that
the most obvious is the idea that explaining merely the possibility of something
is sufficiently explanatory. After all, why would you need to show that something

13
Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

you already know has happened was possible? In fact, I can give at least four
reasons why. First, we want to show this for the same reason that we want to
show that something we already know has happened was necessary. We want to
know why it was necessary. In PE, we do not want to know that it was possible,
we want to know how it was possible. Second, because sometimes, considering
the current state of our knowledge, the event should have been impossible. Third,
because sometimes, considering the current state of our knowledge, the event had
to happen, but did not (i.e. we want to explain how it could be possible that a sup-
posedly strict law has failed). Finally, because it is possible that the universe has
phenomena that are not under the realm of necessity, but still, are limited by nec-
essary conditions and regulated by possibilist laws (such as personal action). This
criticism is closely related to the problem of the relevance of a PE in the face of
some events. Someone could ask: “Can one really have a satisfying explanation
of why someone died, by showing that it was possible for that person to die?”.
Well, when you think about a common phenomenon, of course not. However, if
a man takes six shots in his chest and does not die, we may very well want to
know how it was possible. Nobody is saying that PEs are universally demanded.
It depends on how much we think of a phenomenon as expected or even epistemi-
cally necessary.
Another common objection to HPEs—that someone could also raise against
PEs—is that they are nothing more than incomplete explanations. First, I must point
out that PE provides a complete explanation of the possibility of E when this possi-
bility is what demands an explanation. Second, this depends on the concept of cause
one has. If we would endorse a view of cause as a sufficient condition for the occur-
rence of something, then PE would be an incomplete explanation of the occurrence
of E. However, even in this case, PE would have use and relevant meaning. Never-
theless, if we endorse Lewis’s counterfactual analysis of causation, then PE can be
considered as a complete explanation because it sets a (necessary) condition without
which the event would not have existed. Third, this depends on what one considers
to be an explanation and the type of question asked by the person who demands
an explanation. It would only be incomplete if and only if (1) the kind of explana-
tion required were for why an event was necessary, and (2) the target effect is ruled
by sufficient strict laws. In fact, if the cause of the phenomenon was an act of will
of a human agent (in a dispositionalist sense, if consciousness has its own causal
powers), PE would be a complete scientific explanation (all that science can offer),
although not a complete explanation of all the causes of the act. In this case, we
would only be able to offer necessary conditions to the behaviour and to enter into
the realm of sufficient causation we would have to abandon the scientific ground,
because of its metaphysical limits.
A third possible criticism is that similarly to the problem of permissive condi-
tions for HPEs, a phenomenon use to have several necessary conditions. However, I
should recall that for PE this is just a problem of relevance. In PE, which necessary
condition will count as relevant will depend on the pragmatic context of the law that
has been apparently violated, or at least, confronted with a very improbable out-
come. When used on common phenomena, as proposed here to psychology, the rele-
vant necessary condition will depend on the shared knowledge between the one who

13
 G. A. Castañon

demands and the one who offers an explanation. Moreover, a PE, as stated here, can
also be an incomplete explanation, which is always open to adding further details. If
we do not have the sufficient cause of an event, the more necessary and contributory
conditions we know about it, the more comprehensive its explanation.

7 Conclusion

It is possible to formalise a “how-possibly” explanation into a covering law argu-

ment, which I have called possibilist explanation. Likewise, the law used by it, the
possibilist law, is falsifiable and useful and has more dependable and realist claims
than some other forms of law in the human sciences.
PEs should at least be considered a legitimate part of science because of their role
in the scientific explanation of seemingly epistemically impossible events. However,
they could have a potentially more relevant role in human sciences, because they are
practically achievable (unlike some alternatives) and explain the possibility of indi-
vidual behaviours (instead of effects or behaviour of samples). Moreover, sometimes
we still do not have enough knowledge to give a sufficient or a probabilistic explana-
tion, but we already have enough to offer a possibilist one.
In their turn, PLs could be used to make valuable predictions, which could help to
promote well-being and avoid diseases and harmful situations. We cannot produce
a phenomenon using possibilist knowledge. Nevertheless, we can produce or pre-
vent the (necessary) conditions of its possibility. We may not know yet what takes
a person out of depression. However, we can know a necessary condition for not
being depressed, like a certain level of a neurotransmitter. Therefore, by regularis-
ing it, we can create (necessary) conditions without which a person cannot get out
of depression. Conversely, we may not know the sufficient cause of a disease like
Herpes Zoster yet. However, as we know that it is due to a reactivation of Varicella-
Zoster within a human organism (i.e., that having Varicella-Zoster within a body
is a necessary condition to this disease), we would be able to set the permissive
conditions that promote this reactivation (in a context S). It is by avoiding these
permissive conditions, which we would be able to block the disease. Even better,
we could, given the right means, even completely eradicate this disease from Earth
by eradicating this virus (In fact, that is exactly what we did with type 2 and 3 of
poliomyelitis).
Despite the metaphysical position one could defend about causation, laws of
nature, strict laws or free will, the fact is that we will not always (if ever) be able to
make sufficient or probabilistic predictions in human sciences. The scientific knowl-
edge is not incomplete only because our methods and empirical evidence are so, but
because of the kind of predictions that we can make of a phenomenon. Sometimes,
we can predict its occurrence. Other times we can only predict the probability of its
occurrence. And when even this is not available, still, sometimes, we can predict its
non-occurrence. This is something useful. Even more, this is sometimes the only
scientific knowledge that we can achieve: surely, because of the extreme complexity
of social and human phenomena, and possibly, because of the very nature of reality.

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Possibilist Explanation: Explaining How‑Possibly Through…

Acknowledgements  I am very and especially grateful to Nancy Cartwright for her insightful and sharp
comments on some earlier versions of this paper. I am also especially thankful to Pedro Merlussi for his
generosity, his many revisions on this work and our instigative conversations about this subject. I am
also grateful to the community of philosophers at Durham University for the many exciting and helpful
discussions, with many special thanks to the reviews of Nathalie Cadena, Julian Reiss and Rune Nyrup.
I also owe thanks to Anna Alexandrova, David Papineau, Marco Ruffino and the anonymous referees for
their valuable comments and time spent on my work.

Funding  This work was conducted during a scholarship supported by the International Cooperation Pro-
gram CAPES/COFECUB at Durham University. Financed by CAPES—Brazilian Federal Agency for
Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education within the Ministry of Education of Brazil.

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