In Defense of the Causal mechanical model

Hitchcock's counter-examples showed that Salmon's revised account of scientific explanation cannot resolve the problem of explanatory relevance. In this model, interactions of causal processes introduce different marks or conserved quantities. According to Hitchcock, Salmon's account fails to distinguish marks or conserved quantities which are explanatorily relevant to the explanandum. The aim of this paper is to examine Hitchcock's objection within Lipton's contrastive analysis and resolve explanatory relevance problem of salmon's account of scientific explanation. It is argued that by selecting the appropriate foil and determining the difference between fact and foil, we can distinguish the explanatory relevant marks or conserved quantities.