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Flat mechanisms: a reductionist approach to levels in mechanistic explanations

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Abstract

The mechanistic framework traditionally comes bundled with a multi-level view. Some ascribe ontological weight to these levels, whereas others claim that characterising a higher-level entity and the corresponding lower-level mechanism are only different descriptions of the same thing. The goal of this paper is to develop a consistent metaphysical picture that can underly the latter position. According to this flat view, wholes and their parts are embedded in the same network of interacting units. The flat view preserves the original virtues of the mechanistic approach and is able to avoid the problems associated with the multi-level view.

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Fig. 1

Adapted from Fig. 5 in Craver (2015, p. 22)

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Notes

  1. With regard to the broader metaphysical picture implied by this account, it is in line with Heil’s criticism of levels-based metaphysics (2003, 2012) and with the general approach of one-level physicalism developed by Morris (2019).

  2. While a constitutive mechanistic explanation accounts for phenomenon in terms of a mechanism that constitutes the phenomenon, a so-called etiological mechanistic explanation accounts for a phenomenon in terms of its preceding causes (Kaiser & Krickel, 2017).

  3. It is important to clarify right at the outset that what is called ‘flat view’ in this paper is different from Carl Gillett’s use of the term. According to Gillet (2002), the “flat view” of realisation describes it as a relation between properties of one and the same thing, whereas the “dimensioned view” describes it as a relation between the properties of wholes and the properties of the parts and their organisation. As it will be clarified in Sect. 3, what is called ‘flat view’ here is ‘dimensioned’ in Gillett’s sense.

  4. Different papers utilise the term ‘module’ very differently. The way it is used here is motivated by how the term is employed by network science. In this respect, it is similar to what Baetu (2016) or Bechtel (2017a), and quite different from what e.g. Fagan (2012), calls module.

  5. See also Gánti (2003) for the importance of physical encapsulation.

  6. Of course, some properties of a structured aggregate (like the overall mass of an object, or the hardness of a diamond) cannot be attributed to any single individual component (Gillett, 2010, 2013; Krickel, 2018). The corresponding interaction with the aggregate’s environment is to be identified with the sum (or other function) of the effects of (some of) the individual components on the environment. In heterogenous cases when higher and lower-level causal powers seem to be different mechanists need to rely on bridging principles to identify these causal powers (Fazekas, 2009; Fazekas & Kertesz, 2011). For such interactions there will be no specific input and output channels that could be localised to individual input and output units. Note furthermore that the effect of a module’s output unit on another unit in its environment can be very different from the effect it would exert in isolation, since the functional organisation of a module partly determines how the component units behave (see the constraining effect of encapsulation in the main text).

  7. For this reason a module can be seen as a single entity. (For arguments regarding when a module composed of various entities and activities cannot form a single entity see Kaiser & Krickel, 2017; Krickel, 2018.).

  8. In a recent paper, Dewhurst & Isaac (2021) have presented an empirically motivated challenge to Craver and Bechtel’s classical view on inter-level causation, where the problem stems from a commitment to a metaphysically serious interpretation of a hierarchy of levels. As the flat view directly denies this, it is immune to this problem.

  9. On the assumption that target phenomena are identical to input–output relations.

  10. Page numbers in this section all refer to Bechtel (2017a).

  11. Note that while Soom (2012) also advocates a similar identity claim, Rosenberg (2018) is a better target for Bechtel's original objections as he argues that higher levels are epiphenomenal.

  12. “Nodes that correspond to what are taken as the basic entities […] should not be treated as representing entities at some base level. At best they represent the entities at which the graph representation bottoms out” (p. 270).

  13. “On many occasions researchers seek to decompose one part of the mechanism, leaving others untouched. The graph representation will show the components into which the one mechanism has been decomposed interacting with the other mechanisms that have not been decomposed.” (p. 270).

  14. “The graph representation format does not privilege a lowest level but represents as nodes those entities whose interactions are deemed relevant for under-standing the phenomenon of interest.” (pp. 270–271).

  15. For problematic cases, see Craver (2007, pp. 144–152).

  16. To be more precise: an ideal intervention (Woodward, 2003) on some variable X with respect to variable Y amounts to fixing the value of X without having an impact on Y that is not mediated via X and without being correlated with any other (off-path) causes of Y (see Baumgartner & Casini, 2017, p. 5). For related problems, see Leuridan (2012), and Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016).

  17. Baumgartner and Gebharter (2016) argue that non-reductive physicalism (in the sense of supervenience without type-identity that the mechanistic framework is committed to) and interventionism together are incompatible with the idea of mutual manipulability. As the rest of the chapter demonstrates, within the flat view this is not the case, which suggests that it was the multi-level view itself that caused the problem in the first place. For related arguments claiming that a commitment to a supervenience relation without type-identity together with interventionism entail that higher-level interventions must necessarily be fat-handed see Romero (2015), Eronen and Brooks (2014), and Baumgartner and Casini (2017).

  18. For earlier discussions of this idea that constitutive relevance should be understood as being causally intermediate between the mechanism’s start and termination conditions see Craver (2007, 2015), Povich & Craver (2018), and Harinen (2018).

  19. Experimenters in order to uncover details about the components of mechanisms invent methods and use tools (see e.g. magnetic resonance imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, two-photon excitation, the patch clamp technique, etc.) that allow them to prepare their samples and target units inside modules directly, i.e. to intervene on and detect changes from a unit that is within a module and is neither an input nor an output unit of the module (cf. physical and functional encapsulation). In this sense, these techniques create new, artificial input and out channels that are not part of the module’s normal operation. Not all intervention creates artificial input and output channels, but interventions that aim to explore internal units (that under normal conditions do not interact with the environment of their embedding module directly) must. In a sense this is the very challenge behind the experimental endeavour subserving mechanistic explanations.

  20. Mutual manipulability within the multi-level view is problematic because the higher- and lower-level entities that are targeted by ideal interventions are in non-causal determination relation with each other (Baumgartner & Gebharter, 2016; Woodward, 2015).

  21. For existing attempts to make sense of mutual manipulability along similar lines—but without the conceptual apparatus of the flat view—see Craver (2018), Harinen (2018), Kästner and Andersen (2018), and Prychitko (2019).

  22. Bechtel (2017a, 2017c) offers an alternative methodology for demarcating modules motivated by network science. He claims that network topology can provide the answer: those units form a module that have more (causal and structural) interconnections with each other than with other units.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Nicolas Alzetta, Alma Barner, Loraine Gerardin-Laverge, Kris Goffin, Gergely Kertesz, Magdalini Koukou, Kevin Lande, Bert Leuridan, Thomas Lodewyckx, Manolo Martinez, Chris McCarroll, Bence Nanay, Gervais Raoul, Geraldo Viera, Allert van Westen, Nick Wiltsher, the audience at the 26th Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (Seattle, 2018) and at the Causation or Constitution Workshop (Bergen, 2018) and especially Carl Craver and Beate Krickel for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

Supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO 12B3918N), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement (No 754513) and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.

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    Peter Fazekas

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Fazekas, P. Flat mechanisms: a reductionist approach to levels in mechanistic explanations. Philos Stud 179, 2303–2321 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01764-4

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