  Doubtless our understanding of the notions of causality and causal relevance depends importantly on our grasp of causal explanations. But there are at least two areas of concern about the explanatory strategy (compare Kim 1998, pp. 60–7). First, you might wonder whether the strategy addresses the right question. Earlier, we pointed out that the central question of mental causation is not so much whether mental properties are causally relevant but how they could be, given some alleged feature of mental  properties (in the case at issue here, the feature is their being  relational properties). The explanatory strategy would at best seem  to be addressing only the “whether” question, not the “how” question. Second, even when restricted to the “whether” question, the strategy  rests on a conflation of what appears to be an epistemological notion (explanation) with metaphysical notions (causation and causal  relevance). A full evaluation of the view would thus require a deeper look into how the two are related.