Abstract
Contemporary debates about mechanisms in the philosophy of science raise the question about the relation between constitutive and causal relations. These discussions so far have not received Ernest Sosa’s “Varieties of Causation” (1980), which addresses similar questions from a metaphysical point of view. The present paper reconstructs and evaluates Sosa’s arguments from the perspective of the contemporary debates. We argue that while Sosa’s arguments are probably not suited to advance the current debate, his claim that there are different varieties of causation might be an interesting idea to consider for those who assume that there are interlevel causal relations.
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Notes
- 1.
However, though a plethora of theories has been proposed, the current status seems to be that no convincing reductions are available (cf. Paul and Hall 2013).
- 2.
- 3.
However, the article has been cited in other contexts, both for its merit to explicitly treat cases of causal generation (i.e. cases where the effect is the existence of an object [e.g. cited by Schnieder 2006]), as well as for its uncommon claim that constitutive relations have to be considered causal (e.g. cited by Pettit 1993).
- 4.
In another work, Craver even claims that part and whole are logically dependent: “[I]n the constitutive relation, a token instance of the property Ψ is, in part, constituted by an instance of the property Φ; as such, the tokening of Φ is not logically independent of the tokening of Ψ” (Craver 2007, 153).
- 5.
Craver and Bechtel (2007) also note that assuming actions to be instantaneous might lead to contradictory causal loops.
- 6.
Constitutive relations are usually considered to be asymmetric: parts constitute their wholes but not vice versa. The existence of a table depends on the existence of a board and of a stump (the parts of the table) and their proper arrangement, whereas the existence of the stump or of the board does not depend on the existence of the table.
- 7.
Baumgartner and Gebharter (2015) deny that one can intervene on a whole in such a way without manipulating the parts. They argue that an intervention on a whole always has a fat hand, i.e. it not only changes the whole but also at least one of the parts. On this view, the thesis of mutual manipulability loses its meaning since the top-down direction of manipulation is not sufficiently surgical. Hence, according to this view, constitutive relations also entail an asymmetry in the behaviour under interventions.
References
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Leonhard, G., Näger, P.M., Schäfers, A. (2016). Causation, Constitution, and Existence. In: Bahr, A., Seidel, M. (eds) Ernest Sosa. Münster Lectures in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32519-4_6
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