Abstract
Mechanistic approaches are very common in the causal interpretation of biological and neuroscientific experimental work in today’s philosophy of science. In the mechanistic literature a strict distinction is often made between (intralevel) causal relations and (interlevel) constitutive relations, where the latter cannot be causal. One of the typical reasons for this strict distinction is that constitutive relations are supposedly synchronic whereas most if not all causal relations are diachronic. This strict distinction gives rise to a number of problems, however. Our end goal in this paper is to argue that it should be given up, at least in the context of the biological and the psychological sciences. To that effect, we argue that constitutive relations in this context are diachronic, thus undermining the aforementioned reason. We offer two cases from scientific practice in which constitutive relations are regarded as both diachronic and causally efficacious, review three existing ways of dealing with the apparent diachronic nature of interlevel relations in mechanisms and propose a new account of diachronic, causal constitutive relevance.
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(cf. Bechtel 2017: p. 262)
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Notes
Craver explicitly commits to constitutive relationships being symmetrical, which may lead to problems for his account. This has already been addressed by Samuel Schindler (2013). According to Kistler (2009, pp. 603–604), this symmetry seems to imply that Craver and Bechtel believe constitution to be an identity relation. Rea (1997) and Kistler (2009) explicitly doubt that constitutive relations are identity relations and believe constitution to be an asymmetrical relation. Kirchhoff (2015) acknowledges symmetry but similarly argues against a strict identity relation. See Sect. 7 for a more detailed discussion of the work of Kistler (2009) and Kirchhoff (2015). In this paper, we will leave the symmetry argument untouched.
Unless specified otherwise, the terms ‘component’ and ‘part’, though not strictly interchangeable, will be employed as such in this article.
It is often assumed that the common sense idea, that causes must precede their effects, is fairly widespread in the philosophical literature. A typology of causal accounts, as posited by Leuridan and Lodewyckx (2019), reveals however that the kind of ‘time-first’ accounts that support this common sense idea are more of an exception than a general rule. The currently leading accounts are almost invariably ‘time-independent’ and often make explicit room for cases involving instantaneous and/or backward causation, even though they acknowledge that in fact most causes precede their effects. Some influential theories by contrast demand causation itself to be completely instantaneous.
The term ‘etiological’ is adapted from Leuridan (2012), who uses it to distinguish etiological from interlevel interventions.
As one reviewer correctly remarked, Woodward’s framework is not intended to apply to models in which some variables are non-causally dependent on each other (see Woodward 2015: pp. 325–327, and the references in footnote 15). Yet the point of our paper, and to a certain extent of Leuridan (2012), is precisely to show that interlevel relations in mechanisms are causal after all. Hence the question whether Woodwardian interventionism is applicable to mechanistic interlevel relations should be bracketed here.
We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this issue.
It is important to note that we do not intend to deliver an exhaustive argument to undermine this reason here. That would take another article.
Kim writes: “Event [x, P, t] exists just in case substance x has property P at time t” (Kim 1976: p. 9). Note that the notion of ‘event’ is compatible with the process-based view we will discuss further on (see Sect. 7.3 and 8). Note also that Lewis had his own theory of events. The differences between his account and Kim’s, however, do not matter for our purposes.
Lewis, in the quoted passage, merely talks about ‘nonimplication’. Craver writes that “in the constitutive relation, a token instance of the property is, in part, constituted by an instance of the property; as such, the tokening of is not logically independent of the tokening of.” (2007, p. 153, our emphasis) Hence we take it that it is logical implication which is at stake.
If we reach our intermediate goal, the double assumption which we started from in the current section, viz. that (1) the constitutive relation is synchronic and (2) that it makes sense to think of the constitutive relata as time-slices, should be given up. Giving up (1) only strengthens the arguments just presented. Giving up (2) does not undermine them.
Craver (2007, pp. 145–162) provides a detailed account of the different varieties of such experiments.
Craver and Bechtel (2007: pp. 556–562) analyze and explain away several cases of supposed bottom-up and top-down interlevel causation.
It may again be objected that we are misapplying Woodward’s framework. See the interesting work of, among others, Romero (2015), Baumgartner and Gebharter (2016) and Baumgartner and Casini (2017). These authors have criticized the application of Woodward’s interventionist framework in the context of mechanistic interlevel relations. These criticisms all share a crucial assumption, however, viz. that constitutive relevance is not causal. Therefore, their results by themselves cannot be used to undermine our argument. But if our proposal fails, this would add to the importance of their endeavour. See also footnote 6.
We acknowledge, as does Craver (2007: p. 103), that such experiments are much less clear in the real world. In the history of LTP research, it has been hard to determine which of the many interactions are relevant to the occurrence of LTP, making it difficult to perform the required ideal interventions.
Although the term is seldom used in biological research, it is generally agreed that a true equilibrium with respect to body core temperatures in homeothermic mammals is only attained when the heart ceases to function. In other words, only in death will biological systems ever reach a state of true thermal and mechanical equilibrium with the external environment.
Another interesting critique of the strict distinction between causal and constitutive relations which draws on the temporality of processes is given by Mc Manus (2012). Since he focuses on the subdomain of developmental biology, we will not review his arguments in detail here.
Edges in graph-theoretic network representations may denote different types of relations, yet in his discussion of mechanisms Bechtel treats them as causal (2017: p. 263).
There is a partly analogous phenomenon in the causal modelling literature. Suppose that (variable) X is a cause of (variable) Y. Whether X is a direct cause or an indirect cause of Y in a causal graph depends on which other variables besides X and Y are included. This relativity of the direct/indirect causation distinction is innocuous and does not conflict with the central manipulationist idea.
It deserves to be mentioned that Bechtel explicitly touches upon the problem of epiphenomenalism and claims that his graph theoretic account is not guilty of it (2017: p. 269–270). He offers three reasons. The first is that “the nodes in a network need not belong to a common level in any of the standard senses” (p. 270), such as levels of size, or levels of types of entity. Levels can only be distinguished locally, he adds, within a mechanism. Hence if a graph comprises several modules or mechanisms, one cannot treat its nodes as at a common level. That is true, but leaves our argument about Figs. 1 and 2 unaffected, as it does not hinge on the assumption that there is such an all-encompassing common level. Bechtel’s second and third reason we have already mentioned. These are that researchers can always choose for a finer-grained or a more coarse-grained level of description respectively. Again, that is true, but leaves our argument unaffected as well. It is precisely the (true) fact that researchers can switch between levels of description that (inadvertently) gives rise to said epiphenomenalism within Bechtel’s framework. That Bechtel opposes epiphenomenalism can also be seen in his work with Jason Winning, in which he defends emergent causal powers. Although the constraint relation itself is not causal, it does “enable objects to have novel, emergent behaviors, this is tantamount to the emergence of causal powers… The ways that mechanisms and their parts are constrained explains why both mechanisms and their components are intrinsically productive; by means of possessing such emergent powers, mechanisms and components causally produce the effects they do” (Winning and Bechtel 2018: p. 294).
We will use the term EIO from here on.
Objects are, for example, organisms, brains, cells, or ion channels. The objects engaged in constitutive-mechanistic phenomena typically have quite clear spatial boundaries (such as membranes) which allow a distinction between inside and outside (see Kaiser 2015). The notion of an object is also supposed to refer to systems. Systems are typically composed of more than one object and most biological systems—such as gene regulatory networks, the immune system, populations, or ecosystems—have less clear spatial boundaries than objects (Kaiser and Krickel 2017: p. 768).
We will leave out explicit reference to the activities (-ing and -ing) in question, but only in the interest of readability. Hence S and the Xi are not to be taken as objects or entities. They are entity-involving occurrences.
We leave it an open question whether the relation between an EIO at t1 and that same EIO at t2 is a causal relation or some other form of co-determination.
Seibt’s general process mereology is not based on spatio-temporal inclusion. See below.
It should be noted that an emphasis on temporal unfolding is present in part of the mechanistic literature. Machamer et al. (2000), for example, seem to agree with such a process-based view of mechanisms, especially within a biological context:
Often, mechanisms are continuous processes that may be treated for convenience as a series of discrete stages or steps. […] Although we may describe or represent these intermediate activities as stages in the operation of the mechanism, they are more accurately viewed as continuous processes (Machamer et al. 2000: pp. 12–13).
Kirchhoff fails to mention this trend in the mechanistic literature. Still, he is right in asserting that the processual nature of mechanistic activities has not yet been sufficiently accounted for and that the standard notion of synchronic constitution is inappropriate when it comes to biological processes. (We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this issue.)
Another scholar who has stressed the importance of processes in biological science, albeit in opposition to the notion of mechanism, is John Dupré (2012).
Kirchhoff supplies several real-world examples, e.g. a Watt generator, a Mexican wave or convection rolls, to illustrate his diachronic process constitution, but does not offer detailed accounts of empirical case studies.
Beholden to enactivism and the Extended Cognition thesis in which brain, body and environment are thought of as dynamically coupled in a cognitive system, Kirchhoff challenges the causal-constitutive fallacy, a common objection against Extended Cognition by Adams and Aizawa (2008). Note that Adams and Aizawa’s criticism would be undermined if we reach our end goal. Note also that Kirchhoff seems to acknowledge that his conception could also be relevant outside of EC (2015: abstract).
Several adherents to EC, including Vernon et al. (2015), defend continuous reciprocal causation, or CRC, which involves multiple simultaneous interactions and complex feedback loops between causes and their effects.
Take for example our Vernon et al. case. It is theoretically possible for the perceptuo-motor coupling to stay active in some instinctive manner, after higher-level cognition is shut down.
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for flagging the two criticisms to be discussed.
Note that this delay between the intervention and the effect on the spatial tasks is different from both the problem of the etiological nature of experimental apparatus and the problem of causal-constitutive propagation discussed by Leuridan (2012, §11).
Note that in this case, synchronic causality may still be considered a possibility in the framework of Woodwardian interventionism. Of course, strictly following the processual point of view defended by Seibt, who defines causality following Salmon (1994), this would be impossible.
We would like to thank the reviewer in question for pressing us on this issue. In our discussion we will leave it an open question whether addiction is a brain disease, although empirical evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that it is—at least in part. Yet we will assume that if it is constituted by changes in the brain, the constitutive relevance relations in question are within the scope of our proposal and hence causal. Otherwise, the reviewer’s worry would not apply.
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Leuridan, B., Lodewyckx, T. Diachronic causal constitutive relations. Synthese 198, 9035–9065 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02616-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02616-0