The Causal Economy Approach to Scientific Explanation (forthcoming) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, eds. Waters and Woodward

This paper sketches an account of causal explanation whose guiding principle is that complete explanations select packages of causal influence which give the largest ‘bang-for-your-buck,’ offering the best trade-off between abstractness and stability. A central virtue of this view is that it promises to make sense of how high-level, detail-sparse explanations might be objectively superior to fully reductive counterparts. 

Explaining Causal Selection with Explanatory Causal Economy (2015) Explanation in Biology, eds. Malaterre and Braillard, p. 413-438,  Book Link

This paper uses the causal economy account (above) to give a causal-explanatory analysis of the distinction between causes and background conditions, applying the analysis to questions about ‘causal democracy’ in explanations of ontogeny.

New Mechanistic Explanation and the Need for Explanatory Constraints (2016) Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground, eds. Aizawa and Gillett, p. 41-74,  Book Link

This paper argues that the new mechanistic approach to scientific explanation has yet to ‘earn its keep’; the paper surveys explanatory problems that the account might be addressing (causation, parthood, levels), concluding in each case that it lacks the resources to do so. 

High-Level Explanation and the Interventionist’s ‘Variables Problem’ (2016) British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 67: 553-577, Journal Link

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Woodward ([2003]), has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt, though poorly understood, hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations—of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology, and economics—are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this article to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal–explanatory scheme, as presently formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous.