My dissertation investigates the semantic contribution of the individual words ;;why’ and ;;because;;, attempting to get clear on whether and how some of our central explanatory terminology gets disambiguated, and thereby to make some progress on a theory of ;;why’-questions that can tell us something substantive about explanation. I argue that ;;why’ and ;;because’ have literal causal senses, as well as distinct senses that we use to communicate metaphysical explanations. I show that apparent further semantic variations in the meaning of ;;because’ in its so-called epistemic and metalinguistic uses are illusory, and give a full explanation of those variations in terms of syntactic ambiguities. Finally, I argue that a causal metaphor unifies the senses of ;;why;; and ;;because;; at issue in metaphysical explanations with their literal causal senses. What this semantic investigation turns out to offer us, I argue, is a new understanding of the centrality of causal explanation to explanation in general.
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