Abstract
An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires an account of what Craver (J Philos Res, 32:3–20, 2007b) termed “constitutive relevance.” Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. Craver’s mutual manipulability (MM) account extended Woodward’s account of manipulationist counterfactuals to analyze how interlevel experiments establish constitutive relevance. Critics of MM (e.g., Baumgartner and Casini, Philos Sci 84:214–233, 2017; Baumgartner and Gebharter, Brit J Philos Sci 67:731–756, 2016) argue that applying Woodward’s account to this philosophical problem conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent. These criticisms, we argue, arise from failing to distinguish the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects of the problem of constitutive relevance. In distinguishing these aspects of the problem and responding to these critics accordingly, we amend MM into a refined epistemic criterion, the “matched interlevel experiments” (MIE) account. Further, we explain how this epistemological thesis is grounded in the plausible metaphysical thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness.
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09 July 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03248-8
Notes
We treat Baumgartner, Gebharter, and Casini’s as a single critical commentary, though we acknowledge that they might not all agree on every point.
As Illari and Williamson (2012) note, the ontological significance of the many formulations of “mechanism” is often overstated. We use Glennan’s (2017) definition of “minimal mechanism”, which itself borrows MDC’s (2000) convention of distinguishing “entities,” the component parts, and “activities,” the component processes. Interactions are activities among two or more entities (Tabery, 2004). See Glennan (2017), Kaiser (2018), and Krickel (2018).
One persistent criticism of the mechanistic approach is that it ignores the processual character of biological systems (Dupré, 2013; Dupré and Nicholson, 2018; Nicholson, 2012). This is puzzling given that processes were at the heart of Salmon’s philosophy and that more recent mechanistic approaches have often adopted that processual orientation explicitly (see, e.g., MDC, 2000; Glennan, 2017).
Reflection on examples suggests that embodiment (in an S) comes in degrees. But to elucidate and defend this claim would require us to articulate more clearly the criteria by which entities are identified and individuated, and the conditions under which a collection of entities compose another entity. See Gillett (2016) and Glennan (2020) for recent discussions. Because the constitutive relevance problem is about the processual core of mechanisms, we bracket this question.
Woodward (2020) notes that the value of the cause variable cannot in this case be fixed independently of the value of the would-be effect variable. This is true, however, precisely for the deeper reason that the two stand in a part-whole relationship to one another, as mechanists emphasize.
To reject interlevel causal relations is consistent with emphasizing the import of higher-level causes in multilevel mechanisms. Mechanists generally (Craver 2007a, b; Glennan 2010, 2017) defend the existence and explanatory relevance of higher-level causes while rejecting the idea of interlevel causation as incoherent. Even if scientists do not routinely guard these metaphysical distinctions, they must be guarded nonetheless if we are to avoid speaking nonsense.
Some (e.g., Baumgartner & Casini 2017 and two anonymous reviewers) interpret Craver as offering a necessary and sufficient condition, but the textual evidence against this interpretation seems unambiguous. Craver describes MM as a sufficient condition (2007a, pp. 104, 141, 159 twice; 2007b, p. 17). His formal specification is articulated using “if” (2007a, p. 154) or “when” (p. 153; 2007b, p. 15) rather than “only if,” “if and only if,” or “when and only when.” Finally, he offers counterexamples to show the thesis is not a necessary condition (2007a, beginning on p. 159; 2007b, p. 17) and so only a “suitable starting point for an account of constitutive relevance” (2007a, p. 160).
Baumgartner and Cassini’s critique of MM rests in part on treating MM as a necessary and sufficient condition. Their positive argument for treating it as such despite the textual evidence in note 7, we believe, comes from a misreading of MM. They argue as follows:
MM provides a sufficient condition for constitutive relevance and a sufficient condition for constitutive irrelevance, which jointly amount to a sufficient and necessary condition for constitutive relevance—that is, to a complete definition of constitution (Baumgartner & Casini 2017, p. 218).
But their reasoning is fallacious. Consider the following formalization:
R: X’s ϕ-ing is constitutively relevant to S’s ψ-ing (constitutive relevance)
B: manipulating ϕ changes ψ (bottom-up manipulability)
T: manipulating ψ changes ϕ (top-down manipulability)
Baumgartner and Casini take Craver to assert the following sufficient conditions for relevance and irrelevance respectively:
(1) (B & T) ⊃ R
(2) ~(B & T) ⊃ ~R
Together, (1) and (2) are indeed equivalent to a necessary and sufficient condition:
(3) R ≡ (B & T)
However, Craver does not assert (2), and it appears Baumgartner and Casini have misplaced the negation in (2). Craver’s actual statement of the sufficient condition is:
Using our formalization:
(2C) (~B & ~T) ⊃ ~R
Crucially, 1 and 2C do not together entail a biconditional. As Craver writes, in cases where B is true but T is false, or vice versa, constitutive relevance is indeterminate.
We do not doubt that wholes supervene on the organized collections of their parts, but the nature of this relation is a matter of dispute. We focus on the part-whole relation because it is better understood, and the putative challenge to MM comes directly from the impossibility of causal relations obtaining between parts and wholes.
Parentheses indicate that ψ may be more or less embodied and so S is not essential to the parthood relation we consider.
Some critics reject high-level interventions as “fat-handed”, a term borrowed from, e.g., Scheines (2005). A fat-handed intervention on ψ changes more variables than ψ, including possibly ϕ. But fat-handedness per se is not the problem here. Fat-handed interventions are problematic when the same intervention simultaneously manipulates two variables, each of which independently could be causally relevant de facto to the putative effect. In this case, however, the variables are not independent competitors. Rather, the intervention on the putative cause necessarily changes the putative effect. That is not de facto fat-handedness but rather a metaphysically necessary fat-handedness. Our two reconstructions of the problem here dispense with this obfuscatory ambiguity.
Top-down inhibitory experiments are the control conditions for top-down excitatory experiments. Whether an intervention is “excitatory” and “inhibitory” depends on how something is situated in a causal context.
Pearl (2012) generalizes the same idea to non-binary relations. That our reconstruction captures the idea of “causal mediation” developed in the causal modeling literature gives us some confidence that this integration of ontology and epistemology is on the right track. This convergence of qualitative discussions of mechanisms with quantitative work on causal modeling is a desired outcome, not a result to be shunned.
Causal betweenness is a three-place relation, B(x, y, z), between events, and for some event, Xi’s ϕi-ing, to be constitutively relevant to a mechanism that ψs, it must be the case that B(ψin, Xi’s ϕi-ing, ψout). The Xi’s ϕi-ing shown in the lower half of Fig. 1 in fact lie causally between ψin and ψout (as shown in Fig. 2). Although the relata of the betweenness relation are events, we also speak of entities Xi or activities ϕi as lying between, when those entities and activities are constituents of the events that lie between. We understand events, in this context, as entities engaging in activities or interactions (see Glennan, 2017). Betweenness is thus fundamentally a relation between particular events. Further work is required to extend this analysis to types of events.
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Craver, C.F., Glennan, S. & Povich, M. Constitutive relevance & mutual manipulability revisited. Synthese 199, 8807–8828 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03183-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03183-8