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| Summary | The subject of interlevel relations concerns the connection between items described by different sciences, from high-level human sciences down to fundamental-level physics. More specifically, philosophers distinguish inter-level relations from purely same-level or intra-level causal relations. For example, the question is not “how does activity in a visual input system cause events in a downstream face-recognition device within the mind?” That is an intra-level question about mental-to-mental causation, and one can answer it by staying within the confines of a psychological theory. Rather, the question is something like “how do neuro-physical parts of the brain realize a face-recognition device?” That is an inter-level question about a neurological-to-mental relation, and one can answer it only by joining items in psychology with those of neuroscience. Philosophers also analyze these inter-level relations in terms of concepts like identity and reduction, or different forms of emergence and supervenience, or part-whole mechanistic relations, or different kinds of realization relations. |
| Key works | Regarding the notion of levels in science, Craver 2007 provides a good discussion of the difference between levels understood in terms of parts for mechanisms versus such things as part-whole composition, mere aggregation, and spatial containment. For discussion of the difference between theories about inter-level causal transitions versus inter-level property instantiation or realization relations, see also Cummins 1983, Craver & Bechtel 2007, and the recent anthology Brooks et al 2021. For reduction, important ideas includes reduction as a derivation by bridge principles (Nagel 1961), approximate reduction (Schaffner 1967), an expanded continuum of strong to weak reduction that advertises no bridge laws (Churchland 1979; Hooker 1981; Bickle 1997; Endicott 1998), compositional or mechanistic reduction (Wimsatt 1976; Rosenberg 2006; Bechtel 2007), and functional reduction (Kim 1998; Marras 2002). For emergence, there are views that involve epistemic, metaphysical, synchronic, and diachronic ideas (McLaughlin 1992; Wimsatt 1997; Humphreys 2008; Wilson 2015), as well as issues about actual cases in the sciences (Batterman 2001; Davies 2006). For supervenience, there are weak, strong, global, and mereological varieties (Kim 1993; Horgan 1993; McLaughlin 1995; Paull & Sider 1992), as well as debates over their significance for issues of explanation and dependence (Grimes 1988; Bennett 2004) and their adequacy to express a doctrine of physicalism (Wilson 2005). For realization, the are accounts in terms of functional roles and occupation (Papineau 1993; Melnyk 1994; Kim 1998), parts and wholes of mechanisms (Cummins 1983; Gillett 2002; Craver 2007), determinables and determinates (MacDonald & MacDonald 1986; Yablo 1992; Wilson 2009), and subsets of causal powers (Wilson 1999, 2011; Shoemaker 2001, 2007). There is also an interesting discussion of inter-level explanation in terms of why questions and answers by grounds in Skow 2016. |
| Introductions | Some works have a fairly broad scope, encompassing several of the views just mentioned. See Beckermann et al 1992; van Gulick 2001; and Kim 2003. |
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Related categories
Subcategories:
Emergence* (676 | 457)
Reduction (991 | 236)
Nonreductive Materialism* (408)
Reductionism (176)
Multiple Realizability (335)
Reduction in Biology* (135 | 89)
Reduction in Ecology* (17)
Reduction in Genetics* (22)
Reduction, Misc (30)
Theory Reduction (163)
Interlevel Metaphysics* (2,854 | 10)
Metaphysics of Mind* (8,809 | 2,259)
Physicalism* (379 | 100)
Realization* (453 | 3)
Supervenience* (588 | 8)
Unity of Science (235)
Interlevel Relations in Biology* (454 | 152)
Interlevel Relations in Cognitive Science* (561 | 128)
Interlevel Relations in Physical Science* (241 | 54)
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