Abstract
While ideal (surgical) interventions are acknowledged by many as valuable tools for the analysis of causation, recent discussions have shown that, since there are no ideal interventions on upper-level phenomena that non-reductively supervene on their underlying mechanisms, interventions cannot—contrary to a popular opinion—ground an informative analysis of constitution. This has led some to abandon the project of analyzing constitution in interventionist terms. By contrast, this paper defines the notion of a horizontally surgical intervention, and argues that, when combined with some innocuous metaphysical principles about the relation between upper and lower levels of mechanisms, that notion delivers a sufficient condition for constitution. This, in turn, strengthens the case for an interventionist analysis of constitution.
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Notes
The terms “constitution” and “constitutive relevance” are sometimes used with differing meanings: single constituents are constitutively relevant to the phenomenon while only the whole lower-level mechanism constitutes it. For ease of expression, we use the terms synonymously here, meaning that “\(\Phi \) constitutes \(\Psi \)” is to be understood in terms of “\(\Phi \)is a constituent (among possibly many) of \(\Psi \)”.
In a recent Stanford Encyclopedia entry, Craver (Craver and Tabery 2017, sect. 3.2) seems to acknowledge the difficulties in applying Woodward’s interventionism to mechanistic systems. However, in an even more recent online presentation (Craver 2018), Craver insists that the problems merely concern the formulation of MM in Craver (2007) and not the theory’s content.
One author (BK) of this paper argues that MM may be saved if the phenomenon is represented by multiple variables standing for different temporal phases of the phenomenon (Krickel 2018).
A cause I of X is a fat-handed intervention on X w.r.t. Y when it violates condition (I3) of Woodward’s (2003, p. 98) definition of an ideal intervention, such that I causes Yalong two (or more) different paths (cf. Scheines 2005, pp. 931–932). The contrast class of fat-handed interventions is the class of surgical interventions. Notice that the distinction between surgical and fat-handed interventions is orthogonal to that between structural and parametric interventions (Eberhardt and Scheines 2007, pp. 986–987), namely between interventions that, respectively, do and do not satisfy condition (I2).
It is a common (often implicit) background assumption in the mechanistic literature that the relata of constitution are not gerrymandered behaviors, even though this assumption is not underwritten by an explicit criterion for gerrymanderedness (Franklin-Hall 2016, §5). We, too, assume that all analyzed variables represent non-gerrymandered behaviors and that it is pre-theoretically clear what gerrymanderedness amounts to.
Note that this spatiotemporal notion of a level is merely instrumental for our ensuing argument; it is not intended as a contribution to the ongoing debate on levels in the mechanistic literature nor, in particular, as an alternative to Craver’s (2007, p. 189) or Bechtel’s (2008, p. 146) notions of a level.
A similar point is made by Eronen and Brooks (2014), without the terminology of fat-handedness.
Notice, however, that Woodward (2015) does not modify the notion of an intervention for the purpose of testing for constitution but rather for the purpose of testing for causation in variable sets including supervenience relations.
The behaviors represented by \({\Phi }^k_i\) and \({\Phi }^h_j\) differ either because they involve different entities or different activities, that is, either because of \(i\ne j\) or because of \(h\ne k\).
Relative to a different interpretation of the variables in the reductio, the resulting contradiction can, of course, also be resolved by rejecting (2) and upholding (1). If \({\Phi }^k_i\) is interpreted to stand for neural activity and not for oxygenation, \({\Phi }^k_i\) turns out to be a constituent of \({\Psi }\), meaning that assumption (2) has to go.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the participants to the Biological Interest Group of the University of Geneva, 21 February 2017, and the audiences of BSPS, Edinburgh, 13 July 2017, and SMS, New York, 5 October 2017. This research was generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Grants Nos. 100017_169810 and 100012E_160866/1 for LC and Grant No. PP00P1_144736/1 for MB. MB is moreover indebted to the Toppforsk-programme of the Bergen Research Foundation and the University of Bergen, Grant No. 811886. BK was supported by the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Situated Cognition”, GRK-2185/1.
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Baumgartner, M., Casini, L. & Krickel, B. Horizontal Surgicality and Mechanistic Constitution. Erkenn 85, 417–430 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0033-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0033-5