Abstract
Some current approaches to causal-mechanistic and/or deterministic analyses in epistemology are to be discussed from the vantage point of the author’s methodological scheme-interpretationism. The assets of the new mechanism orientation are, next to an “indirect” realist interpretation of the differentiated (old and “new”) mechanisms, primarily a study of the “producing” intrinsic processes of causal “mechanisms”. The analysis of effect-engendering/productive and relatively stable or repeatable continuous (chain or branching) processes – i.e. “new” mechanisms – are well suited to describe and answer the very intriguing internally differentiated “how come” and why-questions.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to notice that schemes also consist of sub-schemes. The activation of a sub-scheme is usually immediately related with the activation of the schema itself and the other way around. The comparison of schemata with programs, networks etc. is certainly fruitful and can be visualized in flow charts [even networks] and related structural means admitting of state and point identification of the constituents and the ramifications of some such structures. The encompassing set of the schemes we use to interpret “our world” would represent and comprise in a sense our “private theory” (Rumelhart 1978) of the nature of [our] “reality”. Schemes represent or mirror so to speak our internal models of the respective situations in the world. For cognitions and actions they must be activated, i.e., occur in/as interpretation (processes).
- 2.
On the subconscious level, cognitive quasi-constructs are used to render the profiles of contrast and the structural differentiation by activating the functions of the respective sense organs or their processing units of perception and cognition in the brain as well as the integrating poly-modal and combining (yet in part hypothetical or even hypostatized) centres.
- 3.
The different levels of interpretation are the following ones: IL1 comprises the practically unchangeable productive primary interpretations of primary constitution which might be represented by subconscious schema instantiation. They comprise the hereditarily fixed or could have these senses or at least devise technological means for substituting these. – On the second level we have the habitual, quality forming frame interpretations and schema categorisations as well as ‘categorizations’ that are abstracted from pre-linguistic discriminatory activities, experiences of equality of shape, similarity of presentation and experience etc. Establishment and discriminatory capacity of pre-linguistic conceptualization and development of concepts about language are to be formed on this level. – On level IL3 we have conventional concept formation, namely socially and cultural traditional conventions and norms for representation and forms of discriminatory activities like the explicit conceptualization of framing the world according to natural kinds etc. In so far as this is not related already to language differentiation we can think of a sublevel (IL3a) on which pre-linguistic convention(alization)s are characteristic. On the other hand (on IL3b) we have the explicitly linguistic conventionalization or the differentiation of concepts by means of language. – Level 4 would comprise the consciously formed interpretations of embedding and subsuming as well as classifying and describing according to generic terms, kinds etc. It is the level of ordered concept formation and classification as well as ordering and subsumption. – Level IL5 would go beyond that by rendering explanatory, or in the narrower sense comprehending (“Verstehen”) interpretations as well as justifying a theoretically argumentative interpretations in a sense of looking for reasons and grounds of justification. – Beyond that, it is theoretically important that we have also a level (IL6) of the epistemological and philosophical as well as methodological interpretations of a meta-character, overarching and integrating the procedures of theory building and theory interpretation, methodology and the models of interpretation in the sense of methodological scheme-interpretationism itself. One could call this a cumulative meta-level of interpretation and explicitly speak of epistemological meta-interpretations.
- 4.
In any case, whenever we try to combine phenomena and the results of categorizing under generic perspectives, concepts, equalities of form or shape and similarities as well as analogues genetically founded activation of selective schemata of sense perception (e. g. contrasts of dark and light etc.) as well as the interactive, selective activations of early ontogenetic developments like the stages of developmental psychology discussed by Piaget. – Also comprised are the biologically hardwired primary theories which we cannot alter at will, but which we can (only) problematize in principle. For instance we have no magnetic sense or capacity to trace ultrasound like the bats. But we can conceive of conditions in which we would have (analogues) of all these.
That is true not only for cognition, but also for actions, i.e. not only for passive sorts of ‘grasping’, but also for rather active kinds of cognition and action – even for normative (prescriptive or evaluative) patterns. – In general, we use mental representations of frames, structures, models and any other data features or contents which are typified, generically distinguished and concentrated to relevant features which are retrievable from memory.
- 5.
- 6.
Instead of Kant’s “a priori” foundation of his “categories” as the necessary and universal even “logical” absolute structures of the “Understanding” (“Verstand” in his understanding) we have to give up Kant’s absolutism (universal validity founded by the forms of Reason (Vernunft) and necessity logically derived from the logical forms of judgments, see my 1968, chap. I) This certainly is true also for a more precise and differentiated interpretation of (the concept/category of) causality. In this case as in general, we can use some of the Kantian categories in a more ‘liberalized’ fashion – allowing, e.g., statistical and even collective or chance causation like in thermodynamics or in the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
Notwithstanding Kant’s deterministic, even ‘logical’ absolutism he had an important inkling – via his epistemological and metaphysical ‘indirectism’ – i.e. a rather methodological interpretationism of sorts: he may be taken as a progenitor (or at least forerunner) of a more flexible category- or scheme-interpretationism.
- 7.
Although J. St. Mill was an overall adherent of Hume’s regularity theory of the so-called “causation”, he wistfully wrote (in his 1843, 445): “All laws of causation, in consequence of their liability to be counteracted, require to be stated in words affirmative of tendencies only, and not of actual reality”(my ital.) .– That statement seems to me (and some other authors like Cartwright 1989; Wachter 2009; Falkenburg 2012) a very far-reaching insight from a methodological and epistemological point of view.
- 8.
Mackie’s (1965/1993, 34 f, 1974, 62) famous INUS conditions (“insufficient but necessary part of a (complex, HL) condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result” (suggested by D.C. Stove) can indeed also be interpreted as a variant of a (potential) regularity conception of causation. That however depends on the rather open, if not unlimited disjunction of the “minimal sufficient conditions” (term after Marc-Wogau 1962) and the understanding of the sort of “necessitation” involved. The latter one need not be strictly “lawlike” or of DN-form but may be “parasitic on contingent general principles” (Sosa 1993, 241) or a “set of properties” being “a minimal sufficient set” or disjunction of such ones for the caused individual event/result (Kim 1993, 72). There are different non-lawlike “cases of necessitation each with its own distinguishing features” which we still (in particular in historical or counterfactual or probabilistic relations) may call some kinds of factually quasi-necessary variants of causation (Sosa ibid., 242).
- 9.
Other problems are raised by functional causal or teleonomic explanations as well as from statistical causality in quantum measurement problems or collective mass interaction explanation – like in thermodynamics quantum theory – or deterministic (or may be in the near future also probababilistic) chaos theory or in mathematically complex dynamics with bifurcation dynamics and strange attractors etc.
- 10.
Woodward thinks that basically so-called “pure science” and “applied science” are “deeply intertwined”; both are interested in “representing nature in a way that permits manipulation and control” (2003, 12). He sets up as “necessary and sufficient conditions” for X to be “a (type-level) direct cause of Y with respect to a variable set V” if there is “a possible intervention on X that will change Y or the probability distribution of Y when one holds fixed at some value all other variables Z ….. A necessary and sufficient condition for X to be a …. contributing cause …. Is that (i) there be a directed path from X to Y such that each link in this path is a direct causal relationship” and “that (ii) there be some intervention on X that will change Y” with all other variables on the path being “fixed at some value” (ibid. 59).
- 11.
Obviously, the manipulability theory is another interventionist causal theory according to Falkenburg’s list (no. IV or 3.). As all different causality approaches also this one has its difficulties as, e.g., Heidelberger (1992, 144 f.) had already made clear: the rather ‘anthropomorphic’ interventionism would show “convincingly that a philosophical analysis of our agency/acting and our active interaction with the world cannot dispense with the (better, a, HL) concept of causality. But at last it cannot make plausible that manipulability by the human(s) is really constitutive for the causal relation” (ital. HL). That is right. However Heidelberger just seems still to hypostatize “the one” rather comprehensive “concept of causality” to be found and analyzed to “render us a criterion for the asymmetry of causality that does not anthropomorphize natural science”. He did at that time not see the methodological way- out by interpretationism/ perspectivism to distinguish between different “variants of causalities” in the practices of the sciences and other related disciplines and to integrate them again in a more or less loose manner for and in the highly necessary inter- and cross-disciplinary discourses!
- 12.
Glennan (2012, 316) sees Woodward’s manipulability approach thus as a kind of a mechanistic proposal favoring “direct invariant change-relating generalizations”. The new mechanist would only add the very “hierarchical” and systemic “character” of the “intervening mechanisms”, mitigate the invariance requirement towards just a sort of stable/relatively robust, “regular” or “repeatable “mechanisms as systems” – that is as “organized collections of parts”. Also required would be “to provide a more adequate and general mechanistic account of singular causal sequences … to describe causal processes in terms of the interactions of parts as is done in the systems approach, but to recognize that in many singular chains, the parts are not organized in a stable system” (ibid. 323).
- 13.
Instead of the narrow traditional wording of classical mechanics, the expressions ‘mechanist’, ‘mechanisms’, (even!) ‘mechanical’, etc. are used in genetics, molecular and neurobiology and -physiology and for organic chemical reactions and systems, not to speak of electrical and electronic or even quantum (mechanical) changes, processes and systems. ‘Mechanism’ seems to cover such a wide variety of processes that, if undifferentiated, it comes down to be a cover-all umbrella term or “misnomer”. It would have been less irritating to talk of whatever ‘directed’ or dynamical etc. processes.
- 14.
The well-known systems theoretical concepts and strategies of ultra- and multi-stability are not mentioned, although many, if not most, biological systems and organisms with their notable internal and external flexibility and adaptability, even robustness, are essentially dependent on those capacities.
- 15.
Already decades ago authors like Bromberger, Scriven and Salmon and many others criticized the static subsumption under all-too-general laws for its lack of detailed causation descriptions: “Philosophical arguments against the covering law model often focused on its inability to deal with causal, etiological explanations. The model failed to deliver the right verdict on a variety of problem cases precisely because it attempted to provide an account of explanation without any explicit mention of causation” (Craver-Tabery after Salmon 1984). (New mechanists even extend such criticisms to the covering law model of intertheoretic, micro-reduction.)
- 16.
- 17.
“Black boxes, question marks, and filler-terms (such as ‘activate’, ‘cause’, or ‘inhibitor’) hold the place for some entity, activity or process yet to be discovered. The distinction between sketches and schemas is a matter of completeness: schemas are more complete than sketches in the sense that a sketch omits one or more stages of the mechanism that have to be understood if one really wants to solve one’s discovery problem” (Craver and Tabery 2015, 3.3).
- 18.
“Mechanists also emphasize the distinction between a how-possibly schema and a how-actually-enough schema (Craver and Darden 2013). A ‘how-possibly schema’ describes how entities and activities might be organized to produce a phenomenon. “It is a hypothesis about “how the mechanism works. Such models might be true (enough) or false. A true (enough) ‘how-possibly model’ is (though we may not know it) also a’ how-actually (enough) model’. A ‘how-actually-enough schema’ describes how entities and activities are in fact organized to produce the phenomenon. The term ‘how-actually-enough’ captures the idea that the requisite ‘accuracy’ of a mechanistic model can vary considerably from one pragmatic context to another” (Craver and Tabery 2015, 3.3.1). ‘How possibly models’ are merely ‘just-so-stories’ similar to promising ‘hypotheses’ that may fail. They may be fruitful as a possibility but need not necessarily be endorsed.
- 19.
“Theory change in biology would be most accurately characterized in terms of the gradual and piecemeal construction, as in turn the evaluation and revision of multi-level mechanism schemata” “Elimination or replacement should be understood in terms of the reconceptualization or abandonment of the phenomenon to be explained, of a proposed mechanism schema, or of its purported components. This contrasts with the static two-place relations between different theories (or levels) and with the case of logical deduction…. This model cannot accommodate the prevalent multi-level character of explanations in our sciences” (Machamer et al. 2000).
- 20.
“There can be causal relationships between things of different sizes, and there can be causal relationships between things described in very different vocabularies; but (again, conjoined with certain assumptions about the temporal asymmetry of cause and effect and the independence of cause and effect) there cannot be causal relationships between the behavior of a mechanism and the activities of the (very, HL) parts that jointly constitute that behavior” (Craver and Tabery 2015, 4.2, my ital.).
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Lenk, H. (2019). A Methodological Interpretation of Mechanistic Explanations. In: Falkenburg, B., Schiemann, G. (eds) Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond. European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10707-9_8
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