According to an increasingly popular view among philosophers of science, both causal and non-causal explanations can be accounted for by a single theory: the counterfactual theory of explanation. A kind of non-causal explanation that has gained much attention recently but that this theory seems unable to account for are grounding explanations. Reutlinger (Eur J Philos Sci 7(2):239-256, 2017) has argued that, despite these appearances to the contrary, such explanations are covered by his version of the counterfactual theory. His idea is supported by recent work on grounding by Schaffer and Wilson who claim there to be a tight connection between grounding and counterfactual dependence. The present paper evaluates the prospects of the idea. We show that there is only a weak sense in which grounding explanations convey information about counterfactual dependencies, and that this fact cannot plausibly be taken to reveal a distinctive feature that grounding explanations share with other kinds of explanations.

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形而上学解释和反事实解释理论

根据科学哲学家中越来越流行的观点，因果解释和非因果解释都可以用一个理论来解释：反事实解释理论。最近受到广泛关注但该理论似乎无法解释的一种非因果解释是基础解释。Reutlinger (Eur J Philos Sci 7(2):239-256, 2017) 认为，尽管有这些相反的现象，但他的反事实理论版本涵盖了这些解释。他的想法得到了 Schaffer 和 Wilson 最近关于基础的工作的支持，他们声称基础和反事实依赖之间存在紧密联系。本论文评估了该想法的前景。