Carl Hempel (1965) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Richard Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive causal explanation is described and defended. It provides a new limit on what probabilistic hypotheses can explain; the limitation is that P cannot explain why E is true rather than A if P assign E a probability that is less than or equal to the probability that P assigns to A. The view entails that a true deterministic theory and a true probabilistic theory that apply to the same explanandum partition are such that the deterministic theory explains all the true contrastive propositions constructable from that partition, whereas the probabilistic theory often fails to do so.

中文翻译：

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对比性因果解释理论及其对确定性和概率性假设的解释性的意义

卡尔·亨佩尔（Carl Hempel，1965）认为，概率假设的解释范围有限。他认为，如果假设说E的概率小于0.5，那么假设就无法解释E为什么成立。Wesley Salmon（1971，1984，1990，1998）和Richard Jeffrey（1969）提出相反的观点，认为即使P说E的概率很低，P仍可以解释E为什么为真。这场辩论涉及非对立的解释。在此，描述并捍卫了对比性因果解释的观点。它为概率假设可以解释什么提供了新的限制。局限性在于，如果P分配给E的概率小于或等于P分配给A的概率，则P无法解释为什么E为真而不是A。