Abstract
In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction.
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Notes
I will use the terms “power” and “disposition” interchangeably.
I have offered this way of striking the distinction elsewhere (Baltimore 2019a). Here, though, I use the term “result” instead of “manifestation.” As the quotation of Molnar above indicates, he limits the typical manifestation of a power to its contributory action. (This restriction, we will see in Sect. 4.3, is motivated by considerations of dispositional identity and the potential of a power to contribute to a variety of collective effects.) However, Mumford and Anjum (2011a, p. 5) do seem to allow that the manifestation of a power can extend to the result at which the power is directed (or perhaps only be that result). And Molnar himself, in cases where a power is acting alone, may very well allow the manifestation of a power to include its corresponding result. In any event, given our focus on dispositional interaction, there is no need here to risk conflicting with any of these positions, and we will allow context to dictate the degree to which we address the issue of what counts as a power’s manifestation.
In addition to contribution combination and mutual manifestation, there is also a stimulus-response relation (see Baltimore 2019a). I will not be addressing that relation here, however, as more than enough attention is demanded by contribution combination and mutual manifestation. Furthermore, contribution combination and mutual manifestation more clearly concern causal interaction, which is the focus of the present paper.
Of course, there are other dispositionalists who suggest that the essential connection between powers and their manifestations can render causal relations internal. Heil for example writes, “If a property’s identity is bound up with dispositionalities it would confer on its possessors, and if causal relations are the manifesting of powers, then causal relations would appear to be a species of internal relation” 2012, p. 148. However, we are here focused on contribution combination, which makes Mumford a particularly well suited example. Indeed, notice how Mumford is comfortable making the point in terms of a single power and its manifestation.
There is the concern that a spatial proximity condition for a causal relation (e.g., an object must be close to another object in order for a power of the former to have an effect on the latter) introduces an external relation that threatens the internal status of that causal relation (see Baltimore 2015). But since conditions on the spatial arrangement of interacting powers are largely assumed by both contribution combinationists and mutual manifestationists, such concerns will be set aside so as to focus on issues with a greater potential for impacting our comparison of the two approaches to causal interaction.
It is worth noting here that, in the example of the card house, the counterbalancing approach would seem to involve breaking the case down into two subjects of influence. Each card’s velocity appears to serve as a common subject of influence, as each card is subjected to counterbalancing powers: e.g., a gravitational force that is directed towards card A moving downward meeting with a force (contributed by card B) that is directed towards card A moving upward, the overall result of which is card A maintaining its position (and vice versa, for card B maintaining its position).
The prospects for an additive approach as a further resource will be evaluated in the next subsection.
As pointed out to me by an anonymous referee, Corry (2011) seems to raise the same problem.
Their vector approach does, however, face a variety of concerns [raised, for example, by Bird (2016), McKitrick and Marmodoro in McKitrick et al. (2013) and Pechlivanidi and Psillos (2020)]. For Mumford and Anjum’s attempts to answer (at least some of) those concerns, see their contribution in McKitrick et al. (2013) and Anjum and Mumford (2017). For various ways of augmenting the representational resources of the vector model so as to accommodate a greater variety of dispositionalist approaches to causation, see Baltimore (2019a).
Mumford and Anjum similarly characterize the linearity of systems:
Non-linearity simply involves the output of the system not being proportional to the input. More accurately, a non-linear system does not obey the principle of additivity, which is that:
f(x + y) = f(x) + f(y). (2011a, p. 97)
A one-dimensional quality space would be insufficient, though, for modeling Molnar’s barge case. For the ability of the vector model to incorporate more dimensions in its quality space, see Mumford and Anjum (2011a, pp. 44-45).
Although linear composition was illustrated with the help of Mumford and Anjum’s vector model, it is not necessarily tied to that way of representing powers. One might, for example, acknowledge that certain powers lack the requisite magnitude and direction to be assigned a vector quantity (see Pechlivanidi and Psillos 2020), yet still take those powers to have a scalar quantity suitable for the application of the principle of additive composition.
This point is not limited to the principle of additive composition. For any law of nature that one might apply so as to capture the specific ways in which the contributory actions of powers combine—whether the law be additive, non-additive, or altogether resistant to a mathematical formulation—the point could be made that doing so jeopardizes the self-governance of powers.
It is worth noting that spatial proximity still has a role to play insofar as it is a condition for appropriately partnering powers. Indeed, recall Heil’s point that one might understand a cause to be the bringing together of reciprocal disposition partners. Even so, once appropriately partnered, it is evident that their reciprocal natures do the heavy lifting with respect to their causally interacting. Also, as indicated earlier in footnote 6, we will be setting aside any threats that spatial relations might pose to the internal status of the power-manifestation relation (or, in this case, the relation between powers and their mutual manifestation).
Marmodoro (2017, 2018) does not take the manifestation of a power to be something else (e.g., a new property had by another object) but, rather, another state of that very same power. A collective result produced by interacting powers will therefore not count as a manifestation of those powers:
For example, if a mango has the power to ripen in the heat, the ripening is the actualisation of active and passive powers at play. The ripe state of the mango that comes about is the ‘aftermath’ of the activation of the powers, not their manifestation. The powers are manifested in their activity with each other, not in the state that results from their activation. (2018, p. 18)
However, while Marmodoro limits the manifestation of a power to its state of being active, the directedness of a power is apparently not so limited and can extend to include a distinct entity: “Furthermore, a manifesting power is described in terms of what it does, and this description makes reference to the type of effect the power brings about, namely to the activity that is suffered by the partner-power (e.g. heating)” 2017, p. 63. An agent power is not merely for an intrinsic active state since that active state is inherently directed towards a certain result that involves change in another object. Thus, while a collective result of interacting powers is not taken to be a manifestation of those powers, it is still something at which those powers are essentially directed (as we observed with the heating example above). Indeed, without so tying the aftermath of dispositional interaction to the essential nature of powers, it would be difficult to see how Marmodoro’s position could answer (Q2). Even (Q1) would prove challenging were the directedness of a power overly restricted—the directedness of an agent power towards a distinct entity is critical to accounting for why the activities of agent and patient powers count as a form of interaction with one another.
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I am grateful to Adam Podlaskowski and four anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.
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Baltimore, J.A. Dispositionalism, Causation, and the Interaction Gap. Erkenn 87, 677–692 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00213-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00213-3