Coincidences and the Grain of Explanation

Abstract

Many events in every day life are coincidences. When I went to Denver last year I ended up sitting next to the same person on both my flight there and my flight back. That was a coincidence. Owens (1992, pp.8-9) considers the coincidence of him ending up on a cruise with his old enemy. Lando (2017, p. 133) describes the event of 'the only two people in a supermarket aisle…wearing the same pair of 1980's red Nike Air Ship high-tops' as a coincidence.So it is common to take certain everyday events to be coincidences. But as well as being an everyday notion, the notion of coincidence is theoretically important. In particular, there is pressure for scientific or philosophical theories to avoid coincidences. This pressure is evident in influential arguments in both philosophy and science.For example, Kitcher (2001, p. 71) discusses the discovery of eighteenth century doctor John Arbuthnot who found that more males had been born than females in London in each of the last 82 years. There is a possible microphysical explanation of this fact, one which lays out separately all of the physical details which led to each male or female birth. But, Kitcher argues, such an explanation would make the regularity seem like a 'gigantic coincidence'. However, there is an alternative evolutionary explanation of the regularity. There is an evolutionary tendency to produce a 1:1 sex ratio

Explaining coincidences

“…In sum, Lando's proposal rests on a distinction between being caused and being causally explained whose application to coincidences remains doubtful. In turn, Bhogal's (2020) proposal draws on a difference in modal specificity between explanans and coincidence to pinpoint the difference between explanations of coincidental and non-coincidental facts. I argued that his proposal turns on too restricted a view of coincidences, and thus fails as a general account of the matter.…”

“…4 and 5 of her paper; they apply to the piano case as I've construed it). I will consider two related reactions to the failure of TA, one by Lando (2017) herself and a more recent one by Bhogal (2020). Though I will argue that they should ultimately be rejected, they both have a grain of truth that points to the account I shall propose in due course.…”

“…Lando should thus insist that in coincidences, all candidate explanations in terms of common causes are somehow spurious, or at any rate do not succeed in explaining why the relational fact holds. But, with respect to the piano case, it is at least questionable that this is a promising route to take (Bhogal, 2020: pp. 5-7 raises similar concerns).…”

“…No point in my criticism relies on this difference in our frameworks, and the account I shall offer might be easily adapted to apply to the more restricted sense. 9 BothLando (2017) andBhogal (2020) express sympathy to a restriction of coincidences to such 'matching' facts, and indeed consider only examples in line with this restriction. I will come back to this shortly.…”

“…11 Notice that, since mathematical facts hold of necessity, this rules out, for instance, simple accounts of coincidences in terms of the low probability of their joint obtaining which one might initially feel inclined to hold. BothLando (2017) andBhogal (2020) explicitly leave out non-physical coincidences. My criticism of their accounts does not hinge on this.…”