High-Level Explanation and the Interventionist's 'Variables Problem'

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.