Abstract
This paper explores the status of causation in structuralist metaphysics of physics. What role (if any) does causation play in understanding ‘structure’ in ontological structural realism? I address this question by examining, in a structuralist setting, arguments for and against the idea that fundamental physics deals, perhaps exclusively, with causal properties. I will argue (against Esfeld, Dorato and others) that a structuralist interpretation of fundamental physics should diverge from ‘causal structuralism’. Nevertheless, causation outside fundamental physics, and the basic motivation for causal structuralism outside fundamental physics, can be captured with an appropriate conception of causation.
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Notes
See French (2014) for a cutting edge exploration.
Many more can be identified in the history of philosophy. See, for example, Marmodoro (2009).
The idea that objective reality should be identified with invariances originates from Klein’s ‘Erlangen Programme’ (1872). See Ihmig (1999) for an account of its influence on the development of early structuralist philosophy of physics.
Cf. Shoemaker (1980):
[W]hat makes a property the property it is, what determines its identity, is its potential for contributing to the causal powers of the things that have it. (p. 256)
Cf. Shoemaker (1980):
My reasons for holding this theory of properties are, broadly speaking, epistemological. Only if some causal theory of properties is true, I believe, can it be explained how properties are capable of engaging our knowledge, and our language, in the way they do. (p. 257)
Cf. Esfeld (2009), for example:
I maintain that ontic structural realism, as a position in the metaphysics of science that is a form of scientific realism, is committed to causal structures. (p. 180).
Cf. French and Ladyman (2003a):
[O]ur understanding of structural realism is also informed by the need to provide an ontology that can dissolve some of the metaphysical conundrums of modern physics ...(p. 33).
Different discussions of OSR have focused on different symmetries, ranging from permutation invariance in quantum mechanics [e.g. French and Rickles (2003)], to general covariance of general relativity [e.g. Saunders (2003)], to gauge (Lyre 2004), to the role of symmetry groups in particle physics [e.g. Roberts (2011)].
Cf. French and Ladyman (2003a):
Charge, typically understood as an intrinsic property ...features in the relevant laws of physics and ...what we have here is a reversal of the classical relationship between the concepts of object and law. (p. 39)
French and Ladyman (2003b) also appeal to causation to this effect, claiming that ‘causal relations constitute a fundamental feature of the structure of the world’. (p. 75) In their respective later developments of OSR both French (2014) and Ladyman [in Ladyman and Ross (2007)] have come to deny that causation plays a fundamental role in OSR.
See e.g. (Van Fraassen (1989), p. 243ff) on the connection between invariance and symmetry.
North’s main exemplar is her study of the relationship between Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. In these two formulations of classical mechanics different mathematical structures are used to represent the objective features of the physics, and North has argued that Lagrangian mechanics posits ‘excess structure’, and that Hamiltonian mechanics is for that reason more fundamental, revealing the ‘real structure’. This claim has been criticised by Curiel (2014) and Barrett (2013), for example.
Cf. Ney (2009):
[According to causal foundationalism] causation is fundamentally a microphysical phenomenon, which can be discovered by looking directly at our fundamental physical theories. The obtaining of [all] causal facts depends on the obtaining of facts about physical causation. (p. 741)
Full details can be found in any gauge/quantum field theory textbook, e.g. Ryder (1985).
Continuous symmetry is one specified by parameters that can be varied continuously starting from arbitrarily close to the ‘identity transformation’ (which does not transform the system at all). Lagrangian is a function that completely encodes the dynamics of a system in the sense that it yields the correct equations of motion by substitution into the Euler-Lagrance equation.
External symmetries involve spatiotemporal variables: translations, time displacements, rotations.
In the local transformation the rotation \(\Lambda \) (in the internal variable space) is a function of spatiotemporal location \(x\).
See also Livanios (2010) for a convincing criticism of dispositional essentialism from a perspective that is closely related to mine.
For just one example, consider Steven Weinberg: “Symmetries are fundamental, and possibly all that one needs to learn about the physical world beyond quantum mechanics itself.” (Feynman and Weinberg 1987, p. 79)
See also Dorato and Esfeld (2010).
Cf. (Esfeld 2009, p .188), who talks about such dispositions being ‘irreducible’:
This disposition is irreducible: it is not grounded on non-dispositional, categorical properties. It belongs to the ontological ground floor. It is a real and actual property, not a mere potentiality. It is therefore appropriate to talk in terms of a power for spontaneous localization, this disposition being a causal property that brings about spontaneous localizations. This disposition does not need external manifestation conditions: that is why GRW conceive the disposition in question as one for spontaneous localization.
Esfeld et al. (2013) only focuses on the ontology of Bohmian mechanics and is not at all concerned with structuralism. I’m reading it in the context of Esfeld’s wider campaign for a Causal Structuralist construal of OSR.
See e.g. Ladyman and Ross (2007) for a structuralist critique of this kind of metaphysics.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at University of Leeds and University of Cologne. I would like to thank audiences at these talks. Special thanks to Michael Esfeld, Steven French, Andreas Hüttemann, and Jakob Sprickerhof. I would also like to acknowledge that this paper was partly written during my visiting Fellowship at Durham Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).
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Saatsi, J. Structuralism with and without causation. Synthese 194, 2255–2271 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0595-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0595-y