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  1. Salmon on explanatory relevance.Christopher Read Hitchcock - 1995 - Philosophy of Science 62 (2):304-320.
    One of the motivations for Salmon's (1984) causal theory of explanation was the explanatory irrelevance exhibited by many arguments conforming to Hempel's covering-law models of explanation. However, the nexus of causal processes and interactions characterized by Salmon is not rich enough to supply the necessary conception of explanatory relevance. Salmon's (1994) revised theory, which is briefly criticized on independent grounds, fares no better. There is some possibility that the two-tiered structure of explanation described by Salmon (1984) may be pressed into (...)
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    Farewell to Binary Causation.Christopher Read Hitchcock - 1996 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (2):267 - 282.
    Causation is a topic of perennial philosophical concern. As well as being of intrinsic interest, almost all philosophical concepts — such as knowledge, beauty, and moral responsibility — involve a causal dimension. Nonetheless, attempts to provide a satisfactory account of the nature of causation have typically led to barrages of counterexamples. I hope to show that a number of the difficulties plaguing theories of causation have a common source.Most philosophical theories of causation describe a binary relation between cause and effect, (...)
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    (1 other version)Wittgenstein on private language: Exorcising the ghost from the machine.Christopher Read Hitchcock - 1995 - Philosophia 24 (3-4):127-147.
  4. Probabilistic Causation in Scientific Explanation.Christopher Read Hitchcock - 1993 - Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh
    Salmon has argued that science provides explanations by describing a causal nexus: For Salmon, this nexus is a network of processes and interactions. I argue that this picture of the causal nexus is insufficient for an account of scientific explanation: a taxonomy of causal relevance is also needed. ;Probabilistic theories of causation seem to provide such a taxonomy in their dichotomy between promoting and inhibiting causes. However, standard probabilistic theories are beset by a difficulty called the problem of disjunctive factors. (...)
     
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    Permutation or Tranlation.Christopher Read Hitchcock - 1995 - Southwest Philosophy Review 11 (2):187-205.
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    Discussion: Screening-off and visibility to selection. [REVIEW]Christopher Read Hitchcock - 1997 - Biology and Philosophy 12 (4):521-529.
    Philosophers have used the probabilistic relation of ’screening-off‘ to explicate concepts in the theories of causation and explanation. Brandon has used screening-off relations in an attempt to reconstruct an argument of Mayr and Gould that natural selection acts at the level of the organism. I argue that Brandon‘s reconstruction is unsuccessful.
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