Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a formal account of causal explanation, grounded in a theory of conversational pragmatics, and inspired by the interventionist idea that explanation is about asking and answering what-if-things-had-been-different questions. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the account, relative to previous accounts, by showing that widely recognized "explanatory virtues" emerge naturally, as do subtle empirical patterns concerning the impact of norms on causal judgments. An extended version of the paper with further details can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03732