Abstract
What is it for an individual thing in the natural world—a rock, a mouse, a family or a planet—to be made of other things—crystals, organs, animals, soil, water, or dirt? Rocks, mice, families and planets are composites, but how are we to understand the relation that holds between these composites and their component parts? My aim is to offer a new account of this relation, which I shall call corporeal composition. A central claim of my account is that corporeal composition is grounded in causal relations between components. I will show how this claim, combined with a minimalist approach to causation—that causation is not one thing, but many—entails a position I call compositional minimalism—that composition is not one thing, but many.
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Notes
Note that I use the term “object” in place of Machamer et al’s term “entity” (cf. Kaiser and Krickel 2017). Their terminology, while now entrenched in the mechanisms literature, is unfortunate in the context of metaphysical discussions, since the term “entity” is used by most metaphysicians as the neutral word for anything that might be part of an ontology.
While there is a commonsense distinction between objects (continuants) and occurrents (events and processes), it is a matter of considerable debate whether the distinction is metaphysically fundamental. See (Simons and Melia 2000) for discussion.
Simons suggests that this same approach can handle both the parts of continuants like hearts and the parts of occurrents like heart beats. Perhaps so, but my focus is on occurrents.
Gillett’s requirement of jointness in individual constitution parallels a requirement that has been discussed with respect to mechanistic constitution. Fagan (2012) uses the term “jointness” to characterize the organization of mechanisms, suggesting that jointness requires the “meshing” of properties of the components that allow them to perform functions. For related discussions of organization, see Wimsatt (2007), Glennan (2017).
I have not discussed van Inwagen’s (1995) controversial but influential answer to what he calls the special composition question, but I would observe that the idea that composition depends upon causation, and specifically upon the capacity of the parts to contribute to the characteristic functions/behaviors of the whole, is not so different in spirit from van Inwagen’s. Van Inwagen argues that parts make up wholes only when the activities of the parts constitute “a life.” What distinguishes my position (and presumably also that of Gillett and Simons) from van Inwagen’s is that I am less chauvinistic about life. Many things, living, dead, designed, and accidental can exhibit the kind of cohesion and joint working that is so paradigmatic of living things.
Even if it is possible to draw this distinction, there is a perfectly coherent concept of componency in which a component of a component of S is ipso facto a component of S. That sense of componency is captured by the transitive closure of corporeal composition.
For this reason, a referee has suggested to me that “causal minimalism” might not be the best name for this approach to causation. It is, after all, profligate in its commitments to the great variety of activities. Godfrey-Smith introduced the term “minimalism” by analogy to the minimalism of deflationary theories of truth, and while I’m not sure the analogy is entirely apt, it does point to the fact that the real work of causation (both ontologically and epistemically) is done by specific activities. The pluralism of causal minimalism differs from the “two-concepts” pluralism advanced by (Hall 2004), which distinguishes production from counterfactual dependence or difference-making. Following Anscombe (and Salmon), Machamer et al. see activities as forms of production (Bogen 2008), though I argue (Glennan 2017) there are ways to combine causal minimalism with two-concepts pluralism.
Compositional minimalism is, analogously to causal minimalism, a form of pluralism. Note that this pluralism differs from Gillett’s pluralism, which identifies four different types of compositional relations (for individuals, activities, properties and powers). The claim that corporeal composition is minimal is essentially a claim that Gillett’s individual composition is a minimal concept dependent upon particular and distinct causally grounded composition relations.
A second objection has been pointed out to me by a referee. Perhaps the inference from causal to compositional minimalism is undermined by a disanalogy between causation and composition; while the case for causal minimalism is based on the existence of specific activity concepts that are conceptually and epistemically prior to generic causal concepts, there are no such specific compositional concepts that are conceptually and epistemically prior to the generic compositional concepts. This is an interesting disanalogy, but it doesn’t undermine the argument for compositional minimalism. First, the use of specific activity concepts in scientific discourse and practice is entirely consistent with the use of generic concepts in these contexts, both causal and compositional. We don’t need to banish generic compositional (or causal) concepts to recognize that these concepts are minimal. Second, the absence of specific compositional concepts is a natural consequence of the fact that the minimality of compositional minimalism derives from the plurality of specific causal concepts. One doesn’t need specific composing concepts to get compositional minimalism, because the specificity of composings arises from the specificity of causings.
Cultural differences may change what we characterize as families. I have included cohabiting same-sex partners among families, which is consistent with legal and cultural views of the present era, but such pairs do not receive that honorific in all times and places. The theoretical ground for classifying them together is that (at least now) same-sex and heterosexual families engage in many of the same CBCs. One might make an essentialist argument about the necessity of certain CBCs, but of course there are reasons to doubt that biological or social kinds have essences.
One water molecule may be just like another—except of course that their configuration is altered by energetic state and environment—but as we get to scales of large macromolecules, like DNA, heterogeneity becomes the rule.
Thanks to Sam Fletcher for this helpful example.
There are also the questions discussed above about whether these liaisons amount to fusing individuals into larger families.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were given at the American Philosophical Association Central Division, and at the University of Minnesota, and I benefited greatly from suggestions from the audience. I’d like to thank Samuel Fletcher for suggesting the term “corporeal composition” as an appropriate name for the relation explored in this paper. He, along with Ken Aizawa and Mark Couch, Phyllis Illari and Erik Weber provided comments on various versions of this manuscript. Finally, I’d like to thank four anonymous referees who provided detailed comments and suggestions that significantly improved the paper.
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Glennan, S. Corporeal composition. Synthese 198, 11439–11462 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02805-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02805-x