1 forthcoming in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science High-Level Explanation and the Interventionist's 'Variables Problem'1

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward ([2003]), has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper 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 b