Abstract
Modern science cannot do without Aristotelian powers – thus have argued Cartwright and Pemberton (2013) among many others. Aristotelian powers are essentially dynamic entities, which account for causal phenomena, and thus explain how change comes about in the world. In this chapter I argue that explaining causation in terms of interacting causal powers places causation … beyond the reach of our understanding(!) – because causal interaction shows us what powers do, and not what powers are. Metaphysicians by and large agree that the intrinsic nature of powers is to be dynamic entities. I contend here that their dynamism is irreducible, and crucially, unknowable, rendering what powers are ‘black boxes’ to us, despite multiple attempts of defining them in the literature. The sciences discover only how powers behave, and classify them teleologically to tell us what they do. Powers, however, are mysterious and unexplorable black boxes to us, even though they are indispensable in our scientific explanations of change in the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Thus, David Hume famously argued that what ‘there is’, in causal happenings in the world, is only what we can observe, namely, regularity: ‘All that causation consists of in the objects themselves [i.e. in the empirical world] (which is knowable to cognizers like human beings) is regularity, contiguity, and temporal priority of the cause to the effect. That is all there is to causation […]’ (Hausman on Hume, 1998: 39).
- 2.
I do not differentiate here between powers, dispositions, capacities, etc., because my aim is to develop an argument of general applicability to dynamic properties.
- 3.
Powers qua properties characterise objects, whether objects result from the composition of powers or are ontologically prior to powers. (I endorse the former view.)
- 4.
I briefly present my own view concerning the alleged inactivity of a power when not exercising/manifesting in footnote 24.
- 5.
For present purposes, whether it is the power or its possessor that bring about change, is not an issue that makes a difference to my present argument.
- 6.
The external circumstances only ‘enable’ the exercise of powers but cannot make powers active, as many have noted in the literature, with what is sometimes called the ‘passivism’ objection: if powers were made active by the circumstances they are in, they would be themselves essentially passive entities. Thus e.g. Groff writes: a power ‘has the inherent, non-metaphorically dynamic, wherewithal to M [its manifestation]’ (2013: 222, original emphasis).
- 7.
To be clear: some explanatory work gets done, even if at some cost. Esfeld (2020; see also Esfeld and Deckert 2017) and I concur on the diagnosis that positing powers to explain change is problematic, in so far as it requires appealing to primitives, whose workings are as mysterious as those of Molière’s opium’s virtus dormitiva; but while Esfeld argues that admitting powers as ontological primitives ‘does not lead to a gain in explanation’, I argue that it does do explanatory work. He writes:
[… a theory] does not explain why there is attractive motion in the universe by attributing a mass to bodies, because mass is defined in terms of the role to make bodies attract each other […]: like the dormitive power of [Molière’s] opium, [physical powers such as mass] are defined in terms of the effects that they bring about under certain conditions. That is why they cannot explain these effects. And that is why it does not lead to a gain in explanation to admit powers or dispositions as ontological primitives. They cannot explain why there is motion at all, for they are powers for specific motion. They cannot explain that specific motion either, for they are defined in terms of a causal or functional role that is precisely that specific motion. (2020: 78; my emphasis)
My reply is that an ontological theory needs to explain two things: first, that there is a phenomenon in the world; and second, why/how this phenomenon happens. My claim is that positing powers explains that change happens in the world, even though is sheds no light on why/how it happens, which is primitive dynamism in the ontology. My further claim (which I only state here because it cannot be defended within the scope of this paper) is that there are no alternatives that serve this explanatory purpose, either in metaphysics or in physics. Metaphysical and scientific explanation is grounded on axioms, which are primitives that explain that certain phenomena happen. Explaining also the why/how would ‘undo’ the axiomatic status of primitiveness, rendering axioms into theorems. If however a theory does not posit any axioms, but is grounded on the mutual coherence of the claims of the theory, then it will have no primitive items in the ontology either. But then, ‘coherence’ will be primitive; it will not explain anything, but will be a precondition of all explanation; and the problem will become the ‘black box of coherence’.
- 8.
The Eleatic Principle is Plato’s: ‘I suggest that everything which possesses any power of any kind, either to produce a change in anything of any nature or to be affected even in the least degree by the slightest cause, though it be only on one occasion, has real existence. For I set up as a definition which defines being, that it is nothing else but power.’ (Sophist 247d-e.) A modern formulation is e.g. Armstrong’s, ‘everything that we postulate to exist should make some sort of contribution to the causal/nomic order of the world’ (2004: 37).
- 9.
This point has been laboured by many, among the most recent publications where it is discussed see Vetter (2020). For present purposes, I am assuming that science and metaphysics give us reasons to posit a plurality of powers such as the ones that use as examples in the chapter; I do this for the reader’s sake, to facilitate connecting my arguments to the debates to which I make reference. I am however open to the possibility that there may possibly be a global holistic power that accounts for all change in the world. Such research hypothesis is currently pursued by Simpson (2020a, b) and contemplated for instance by Esfeld (2020).
- 10.
For instance, virtual particles are primitively assumed to behave dynamically.
- 11.
A third sense of a ‘cyclical telos’ (but applying only to biological entities) is that whose end-point is the cyclical maintenance of the organism’s morphology – e.g. the essence of a human is to produce such and such cells, grow this particular bone structure, etc. and productively maintain (by continual replacement) these things; see e.g. in connection with the metaphysics of powers Austin and Marmodoro (2017).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
Mumford goes as far as to take this approach literally, rather than as a metaphor. He writes that those who conceive of powers as having physical intentionality are thereby committed to animism or panpsychism (1999: 220–1).
- 15.
I am not here claiming that those who posit an identity-fixing relation between a power and its exercise/manifestation, do so with the explicit aim to account for the dynamism of powers. My point is that is if we are looking for such an account, this approach may be thought to ‘hit’ closer to the target than others.
- 16.
See e.g. how Yates puts it: “in addition to having R essentially, having R as opposed to some other causal role is what makes charge the property it is, rather than some other property … In other words, R individuates charge” (2012: 1).
- 17.
I demonstrate this in Marmodoro (2007).
- 18.
See Giannini (forthcoming) and Roselli (2022, in this volume).
- 19.
The same characterization of power-based causation and the same assumptions are also e.g. in Groff (2016):
Causes, from this perspective, literally produce the effects that they cause […] I will refer to the dynamic view of causation as a “powers-based” approach, and to the sense of causation that it sustains as “productive” causation […] in the history of Western philosophy, Aristotle is the paradigmatic powers theorist, such that accounts of this type are widely considered to be neo-Aristotelian (2016: 287)
I disagree with the general assumption that powers have a productive activity, and with the specific one that that Aristotle paradigmatically thought so.
- 20.
In the case of Mumford and Anjum, although their views are ‘in the ballpark’ of the mainstream account, it is hard to work out which version of it they hold precisely – if it is a single consistent view, across their multiple publications. They hold that (i) a power P1’s manifestation/exercise is the production of a new power, P2 (see e.g. 2011: 8); (ii) a power P1’s manifestation/exercise is its replacement with a new power, P2 (see e.g. 2011: 5); and (iii) a power P1’s manifestation/exercise is both the end point of the self-transformation of P1 and a new power P2 (see 2018: 69). I call this latter position their ‘hybrid’ account. However, it is an account hard to comprehend; they explain it thus:
This [which I call the ‘hybrid’ account] allows us to answer Marmodoro’s (2013: 550) concern, which was raised against our account of powers. She says that we take the manifestation of a power to be another power, while she thinks that the manifestation is a different stage of the same, first power. But in a process view it can be both. Given that the manifestation of a power produces a continuous change in properties and that properties are understood to be powerful, the properties produced by causes are both the end point of the original power and a new power, available to form a new reciprocal partnership if circumstances allow. (2018: 69)
As I argued above, the exercise of a power is not the same entity as the product of the power, which Mumford and Anjum take it to be in their ‘hybrid’ account. Identifying the two items also runs afoul of the difference between a power altering from one stage to another, and the power transforming into a different power.
- 21.
As mentioned above, the exercise of a power (the magnet’s attracting metal) is metaphysically different from the result that comes about from this exercise (the change of location) of the metal.
- 22.
I am here adapting C. B. Martin and Heil (1998)‘s expression.
- 23.
- 24.
E.g. 4 is dependent on 3 as 3’s successor, but they are not dynamic.
- 25.
In this sense, on my account a power is constantly ready to spring into action, given the chance. By this I mean that the exercise/manifestation of a power is blocked by the environment, unless the appropriate conditions obtain, in which case we observe its manifestation.
- 26.
I here briefly introduce a further issue, which cannot however be developed in full here because it would take us astray from the main argument of this paper. The issue concerns the relationship between powers and time. Does positing that powers have a temporal structure explain their dynamism? The answer is “Yes and no”. There are two conceptions of time: on the Aristotelian, A-series (as we call it) conception of time, time dynamically moves from a ‘now’ to subsequent ‘nows’. On the B-series conception on the other hand time, is like space; distances in space are not dynamic, nor is distance in time; it’s all laid ‘out there’, past, present and future, and events have spatiotemporal distances between them. But nothing ‘happens’ on this conception. So, on former conception of time, the passage of time is dynamic; on the latter, time is non-dynamic. So on the former conception, the temporal structure of powers explains their dynamism too; only that, if that is the case, the black box problem transfers to the nature of time. On the latter conception of time, the dynamism of powers needs to be explained differently than their temporal structure. If we take metaphysics and physics to give us reasons to prefer the B-series conception of time, as I do, what accounts for the dynamism of powers cannot be their temporal structure.
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I am grateful for the feedback received on earlier versions of this paper presented (online) at the Universities of Siegen (Change and Change-makers network) and Tübingen in Germany, Stockholm in Sweden, Turin in Italy (Labont), and the Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Michael Esfeld, Elisa Paganini and Alberto Voltolini also offered helpful comments on previous written versions of the paper, and so did my co-editors and an anonymous referee, whom I thank all warmly. The research leading to this publication was supported by the Leverhulme Trust as part of the project Part-whole relations within the fundamental potentialities in nature (RPG-2018-079).
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Marmodoro, A. (2022). What’s Dynamic About Causal Powers? A Black Box!. In: Austin, C.J., Marmodoro, A., Roselli, A. (eds) Powers, Time and Free Will. Synthese Library, vol 451. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_1
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