Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?

Amidst both philosophers of science and social scientists (including historians) one finds people defending the thesis that explanations of particular facts should refer to proximate causes, or that explanations referring to remote causes are at least less—if they are any—good (e.g. Jon Elster, Paul Veyne, Michael Taylor, etc.). The idea is that any explanatory factor at a temporal remove from the fact to be explained, should be replaced by a factor closer to the fact. This close–grain preference is a matter of favoring explanations that provide the detailed mediating mechanisms in non–interrupted causal chains across time. The claims we want to defend in this paper are: (1) explanations of plain facts (as opposed to explanations of contrasts between facts) that invoke remote causes on top of proximate causes are often better than explanations that invoke only proximate causes; and. (2) explanations of contrasts between facts that invoke only proximate cause are often worthless: one has to invoke a remote cause in order to provide a minimally adequate contrastive explanation. The upshot of this is that the close–grain preference should be replaced with a more differentiated explanatory pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]