Abstract
Downward causation (DC) exercised by emergent properties of wholes upon their lower-level constituents’ properties has been accused of conceptual and metaphysical incoherence. Only upward causation is usually peacefully accepted. The aim of this paper is to criticize and refuse (1) the traditional hierarchical-vertical way of conceiving both types of causation, although preserving their deepest ontological significance, as well as (2) the widespread acceptance of the traditional atomistic-combinatorial view of the entities and the relations that constitute the so-called ‘emergence base’. Assuming those two perspectives with no reserves, we are condemned to confine our debate to the question of whether reified wholes can have the power to downwardly change or influence their lower-level parts, a question which seems profoundly misleading to me. I therefore propose an alternative relational ontological view, assuming a straightforward horizontal and intra-level way of representing those putative cases of cross-level causation. I finally confront two recent replies to Kim’s well-known objections to DC—Craver and Bechtel (Biol Philos 22:547–563, 2007) and Kistler (Philos Psychol 22(5):595–609, 2009)—, emphasizing their global positive approaches, as well as the reasons why their accounts still seem insufficient to me. I conclude arguing that both Kim’s principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and its allegation of an overdetermination in cases of DC can be surpassed by the new relational ontological perspective presented here.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Greek atomists, as Empedocles and Anaxagoras, tried to reconcile the new Eleatic theory of Being with the need to rehabilitate the study of the pluralistic ontology of physical reality. Indeed, while for all the Ionian physicists, ‘being’ designates the plurality of singular things (ta onta) that the human experience captures, in Parmenides the notion of Being will be expressed as singular (to eon), referring to Being in general, as an absolute unity, homogeneous, indivisible, timeless, motionless and unchanging. As it is well known, Atomism advocates the impossibility of both qualitative and substantial kinds of change of the most elementary entities of physical reality (the atoms conceived into the light of Parmenides’ theory of Being), sustaining that all non-fundamental entities and properties arise in virtue of (supervening upon) mere additive, aggregative or combinatorial relations among the atoms that leave intact their own qualitative identities (see Wardy 1988; Graham 1999). If one wants to look for an opposite perspective in the Greek philosophy itself is enough to recall the Aristotelian ontology, according to which the most basic entities of physical reality (the four elements) undergo not only quantitative, but also qualitative and substantial kind of transformations through their own interactions. Lastly, we may observe that the mechanistic paradigm of modern physics is the direct expression of this metaphysical atomism. As David Bohm once wrote, “the most essential and characteristic feature of mechanism (…) [is] to reduce everything in the whole universe completely and perfectly to purely quantitative changes in a few basic kinds of entities (in this case, bodies and fields, or fields alone, as in the point of view of Einstein), which themselves never change qualitatively” (Bohm 1984: 47). Indeed, “[a]t bottom, the only changes that are regarded as possible within this scheme are quantitative changes in the parameters or functions (…), while fundamental qualitative changes in the modes of being of the basic entities and in the forms in which the basic laws are to be expressed are not regarded as possible. Thus, the essence of the mechanistic position lies in its assumption of fixed basic qualities, which means that the laws themselves will finally reduce to purely quantitative relationships.” (idem: 131).
According to the most refined version of this micro-explanatory model of reduction presented by Hüttemann (2004: 35), such a reduction needs three types of ingredients: (1) general laws concerning the behavior the component parts considered by themselves as units of organization (thus, considered in a ideal isolation); and (2) general laws of composition (for vectorial, scalar or tensorial magnitudes); and (3) general laws that account for the mechanist interactions among the lower-level parts that merely account for the quantitative co-variations of their intrinsic properties (such as ‘mass’, ‘position’, ‘motion’, ‘velocity’, ‘acceleration’, etc.).
It is worth to observe that the hierarchical-vertical representation in terms of substantive parts and wholes is far from being the only one way of representing the natural world. The developmental ecologist Stanley N. Salthe, for example, has distinguished two different types of hierarchy, which have been used in models of natural phenomena, including the biological, namely the scalar or composition hierarchy, and the specification or subsumption hierarchy (see Salthe 2009, 2012). In the present case, I want to emphasize the difference between representing relations of composition and organization, on one hand, and causal relations, on the other hand. For an analysis of the theory of levels in terms of its ontological significance and major philosophical implications, see Poli (2001).
Griffiths and Gray (1994: 299): “how exactly is it that has the power to replicate itself? A segment of DNA isolated from the cytoplasmic machinery of ribosomes and proteins has no such power”.
As Lewontin says in the ‘Foreword’ to the second edition of Oyama’s book, ‘constructivist interactionism’ is the view that “in the production of an organism one cannot regard the internal and the external, genes and environment, as alternative causes”, denying “the claim of the ontologically independent status of the causes as causes, aside from their interaction in the effects produced”; indeed, “they become causes only at their nexus, and they cannot exist as causes except in their simultaneous action” (Oyama 2000: 14–15). According to the constructionist, developmental systems perspective, traits are not transmitted to offspring, but are instead made or reconstructed in development. Likewise, evolution is not a matter of organisms or populations being molded by their environments, but of organism-environment systems reciprocally changing over time. Therefore, “the life cycle of an organism is developmentally constructed, not programmed or preformed. It comes into being through interactions between the organism and its surroundings as well as interactions within the organism.” (Oyama et al. 2001: 4). See also Gray (1992).
As an example of a bottom-up constraint, Kistler mentions the case, shown by Shapiro (2005), that “the structure of the brain, shaped by phylogenetic and ontogenetic evolution, constrains cognitive functions, and thus sets limits on the multirealizability of those functions” (Kistler 2009: 608, n. 15). On the notion of DC as a power of constraining, see Deacon 2003; Thompson 2007: 424–428; Bishop 2008; Hooker 2013.
As Max Kistler observes, “[t]he success of ethology and psychology in explaining numerous animal and human behaviors shows that animals and humans obey “system laws” constraining their evolution at the level of systemic properties, such as cognitive laws determining actions on the basis of reasoning and decision-making. The fact that an organism obeys such laws means that its evolution obeys constraints at a psychological level. The constraints exercised on the organism by laws at different levels, at the level of the organism as a whole, and at various lower levels corresponding to its parts, create no conflict. If the determination of a molecular event is incomplete at its own level, it may nevertheless be completely determined jointly by laws at molecular and system levels. A given molecular event happening in an organism may be partly determined by constraints at the molecular level and partly by downward constraints from the psychological level, insofar as the organism obeys psychological laws” (Kistler 2009: 606).
According to Cummings, “what grounds the idea that psychology and geology are not fundamental sciences is the thought that psychological and geological systems are special. The principles of psychology and geology and the other so-called special sciences do not govern nature generally, but only special sorts of systems. (…) At the level of fundamental physics, laws are what you get because, at a fundamental level, all you can do is say how things are. We don’t think of the fundamental laws of motion as effects, because we don’t think of them as specifying the behavior of some specialized sort of system that behaves as it does because of its constitution and organization. The things that obey the fundamental laws of motion (everything) do not have some special constitution or organization that accounts for the fact that they obey those laws. The laws of motion just say what motion is in this possible world” (Cummings 2000: 121–122).
References
Atlan H (1999) La fin du ‘tout génétique’. Vers de nouveaux paradigms en biologie. INRA, Paris
Atlan H, Koppel M (1999) The cellular computer: program or data? Bull Math Biol 52(3):335–348
Bechtel W (2008) Mental mechanisms: philosophical perspectives on cognitive neuroscience. Routledge, New York
Bishop RC (2008) Downward causation in fluid convection. Synthese 160:229–248
Bohm D (1984) Causality and chance in modern physics (1957). Routledge, London
Craver CF, Bechtel W (2007) Top-down causation without top-down causes. Biol Philos 22:547–563
Cummings R (2000) How does it work? versus what are the laws? Two conceptions of psychological explanation. In: Keil F, Wilson R (eds) Explanation and cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 117–145
Curd P (2002) The metaphysics of physics: mixture and separation in Empedocles and Anaxagoras. In: Caston V, Graham D (eds) Presocratic philosophy: essays in honour of Alexander Mourelatos. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp 139–158
Deacon T (2003) The hierarchic logic of emergence: untangling the interdependence of evolution and self-organization. In: Weber B, Depew D (eds) Evolution and learning: the Baldwin effect reconsidered. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 273–308
Diestel R (2000) Graph theory. In: Diestel R (ed) Graduate texts in mathematics, vol 173. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg
Garson J (2006) Emergence. In: Sarkar S, Pfeifer J (eds) The philosophy of science: an encyclopedia. Routledge, New York, pp 230–235
Graham DW (1999) Empedocles and Anaxagoras: responses to Parmenides. In: Long AA (ed) The Cambridge companion to early Greek philosophy, Chapter 8. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 159–180
Gray R (1992) Death of the gene: developmental systems strike back. In: Griffiths P (ed) Trees of life: essays in philosophy of biology. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, pp 165–209
Gray R (2001) Selfish genes or developmental systems? In: Singh R et al (eds) Thinking about evolution: historical, philosophical, and political perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 184–207
Griffiths PE, Gray RD (1994) Developmental systems and evolutionary explanation. J Philos 91(6):277–304
Guthrie WKC (1965) A history of greek philosophy, vol II: The Presocratic tradition from Parmenides to Democritus. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hooker C (2013) On the import of constraints in complex dynamical system. Found Sci 18(4):757–780
Hüttemann A (2004) What’s wrong with physicalism?. Routledge, London and New York
Kim J (1988) Explanatory realism, causal realism, and explanatory exclusion. Midwest Stud Philos 12:225–239
Kim J (1998) Mind in a physical world. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Kim J (1999) Making sense of emergence. Philos Stud 95:3–36
Kim J (2000) Making sense of downward causation. In: Andersen PB, Emmeche C, Finnemann NO, Christiansen PV (eds) Downward causation, minds, bodies, and matter. Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, pp 305–321
Kim J (2006) Emergence: Core ideas and issues. Synthese 151:547–559
Kistler M (2009) Mechanisms and downward causation. Philos Psychol 22(5):595–609
Lewontin R (2000) It ain’t necessarily so: the dream of the human genome and other illusions. New York Review of Books, New York
Oyama S (2000) The ontogeny of information: developmental systems and evolution (2th edn, revised and expanded). Duke University Press, Durham
Oyama S, Gray RD, Griffiths PE (eds) (2001) Cycles of contingency: developmental systems and evolution. MIT Press, Cambridge
Poli R (2001) The basic problem of the theory of levels of reality. Axiomathes 12:261–283
Rosenstiehl P (1979) “Grafo”. In: Enciclopedia, vol VI. Einaudi, Torino, pp 865–896
Salthe SN (2009) A hierarchical framework for levels of reality: understanding through representation. Axiomathes 19:87–99
Salthe SN (2012) Hierarchical structures. Axiomathes 22(3):355–382
Santos, G. (2014) “Ontological Emergence: how is that possible? Towards a new Relational Ontology” (forthcoming)
Schröder J (1998) Emergence: non-deducibility or downwards causation. Philos Q 48:433–452
Shapiro LA (2005) The mind incarnate. MIT Press, Cambridge
Thompson E (2007) Mind in life. Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Wardy RBB (1988) Eleatic pluralism. Arch Geschich Philos 70(2):125–146
Acknowledgments
I thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my manuscript and their insightful and constructive comments and suggestions. My work is funded by a post-doc grant provided by ‘Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia’ (SFRH/BPD/65748/2009).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Santos, G.C. Upward and Downward Causation from a Relational-Horizontal Ontological Perspective. Axiomathes 25, 23–40 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9251-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-014-9251-x