Abstract
Machamer, Darden, and Craver (Philos Sci 67(1):1–25, 2000) propose a dualistic account of mechanisms and believe that it stands in opposition to both substantivalist and process-ontology accounts. They locate Cartwright (Nature’s capacities and their measurement. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989) within the camp of substantivalists. Cartwright (Hunting causes and using them: approaches in philosophy and economics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007) believes that her work shares much in common with Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver’s mechanistic philosophy because of her notion of nomological machine. In this article I demonstrate that this disagreement can be eliminated and that the two accounts are complementary. By comparing Cartwright’s work with that of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, I show that the two accounts presuppose each other’s concepts, and therefore they share a common conceptual structure. However, these commonalities oblige them to meet a challenge that is standardly issued by those philosophers who insist that laws play a crucial role in causal explanations. I argue that this challenge can be overcome by integrating the two accounts.
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- 1.
It is noteworthy that Glennan (1997) tries to integrate Cartwright’s account of capacities with his own account of mechanisms, although his account is not in the style of MDC.
- 2.
Cartwright calls herself an anti-fundamentalist and assigns the “fundamentalist” label to her philosophical opponents. Given that the term “fundamentalist” has a negative sense in many religious contexts, Hoefer complains: “Who wants to call him- or herself a fundamentalist?” (Hoefer 2008, p. 308) Let me use the epistemological term “foundationalist” in place of “fundamentalist.” Just as epistemological foundationalists claim that there are basic beliefs not derived from other beliefs, Cartwright’s critics typically insist that there are at least some fundamental (basic) laws that are not mechanically explicable.
- 3.
By “MDC-style mechanists”, I mean those philosophers who endorse MDC’s dualistic account of mechanism and reject the necessity of laws or generalizations in mechanistic explanations. As a consequence, although Stuart Glennan is also a mechanist in some sense, he is not a MDC-style mechanist.
- 4.
Machamer (2004) develops an elaborated metaphysical and epistemological analysis of activities, but he concludes that “the active exercise of a capacity has to be ontologically prior to any mysterious property called the ability to exercise that capacity” (Machamer 2004, p. 30). I find this conclusion implausible. What we can derive is only the epistemological priority of activities.
- 5.
This view originates from Shoemaker’s work in the 1980s. Shoemaker (1980) sees that genuine properties are constituted by causal powers and thus distinguishes them from Cambridge properties. Here, powers are constituents of properties rather than that powers are properties of properties. “Cambridge properties” means those properties that are not intrinsic to entities, and their predications are not always true at different times. For instance, in the sentence “Obama is the present president of the U.S.A.,” the present president of the U.S.A. is a mere Cambridge property (of Obama). In this sense, Cambridge properties are not genuine properties. Mumford and Anjum (2011) believe that an ontology, whereby properties are just powers, is more parsimonious than one containing both properties and powers with the former not reducible to the latter. Mumford (2004, ch. 10) develops this view and provides a strong and persuasive defense.
- 6.
It may be easier for people to accept that all capacities are properties than that all properties are capacities. Otávio Bueno cast such a doubt about the pan-capacity view. It seems easy to take some property that, intuitively, is not a capacity or a cluster of capacities. For instance, distance is a relation or a relational property between two bodies – is it a capacity? Intuitively, distance is not a capacity of entities, but it depends on other capacities such as movability and separability. Only both of the two bodies having movability and separability can form a distance between the two bodies. Thus, distance is derived property rather than a primary property. The distance between two bodies may change from time to time, and so distance is also a Cambridge property. A detailed discussion about this problem is best left for another paper.
- 7.
Mumford (2004: ch. 10) and Mumford and Anjum (2011, p. 4) call the view pandisponsitionism and defend it. Many philosophers or metaphysicians view disposition as being identical with or equivalent to power or capacity. Indeed, Cartwright usually uses “power” as being synonymous with “capacity,” but she rejects capacity or power being identical with disposition (private communication). Pemberton also thinks that it would be problematic to interpret Cartwright’s capacity in terms of disposition (private communication). Thus, I use “the pan-capacity view” to express the view that all genuine properties are capacities. Owing to Kai-Yuan Cheng’s notification, I recognize that it is arguable whether or not all properties are dispositional.
- 8.
Glennan takes on a similar tone, as he writes that “[t]he correct understanding of the claim that ‘aspirins – because of being aspirins – can cure headaches’ is that individual aspirins, in virtue of having the property of being aspirins, have another property, the capacity to cure headache” (1997, p. 615). If we understand entities as individual entities, then my view is exactly that expressed in Glennan’s comment.
- 9.
Mumford also notes that “a rich ontology is favoured in which a category of substance is required over and above the category of properties. Just because one thinks properties are exhausted by powers, one is not committed to viewing substances as exhausted by properties” (Mumford 2004, p. 173–174). He does not go on to explain why he holds this view.
- 10.
Cartwright describes the nomological machine of the planets in the solar system as follows: “In the case of the orbiting planet, the constituents of the nomological machine are the sun, characterized as a point-mass of magnitude M, and the planet, a point-mass of magnitude m, orbiting at a distance r and connected to the former by a constant attractive force directed towards it” (Cartwright 1999, p. 51). These characterizations of point-masses, distance, and constant attractive force are really a model. As Cartwright notes, models of this sort function as blueprints for nomological machine (Cartwright 1999, p. 58).
- 11.
Glennan defines “a mechanism underlying a behavior” as “a complex system which produces that behavior by…the interaction of a number of parts according to direct causal laws” (Glennan 1996, p. 52). MDC argue that “Glennan’s reliance on the concept of a ‘law’ problematic because, in our examples, there are rarely ‘direct causal laws’ to characterize how activities operate. More importantly, as we argue in Sect. 1.3, the interactionist’s reliance on laws and interactions seems to us to leave out the productive nature of activities” (MDC 2000, p. 4).
- 12.
- 13.
Machamer (2004) discusses in detail how to identify a capacity in terms of identifying an activity. He correctly sees that “[o]ne can’t specify a tendency or a capacity without having some way to identify what the capacity does when it is actualized or exercised. However, being able to recognize what a capacity does when actualized or the activity that constitutes it presupposes having the concept of that activity. Having the concept of that activity entails that one may use it in the identification of instances of that activity. This means that one needs to know how to fix the referent for that activity” (Machamer 2004, p. 30). Machamer develops an epistemology of activities that is very helpful here, but this does not mean that activities are ontologically prior to capacities. See the discussion in Sect. 2.
- 14.
It is noteworthy that the third figure of MDC, Carl F. Craver, develops a sophisticated account of causal explanations based on the MDC framework of mechanisms in his book, Explaining the Brain (Craver 2007). In order to not become involved in debates over its explanation, I leave aside Craver’s account of causality in this article.
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Acknowledgement
I deeply thank two anonymous reviewers. Their long and valuable reviews have helped improve the contents and arguments of this article to a large extent. The draft of this article was presented in “Evidence, Capacities, and Explanation: Conference on Cartwright’s Philosophy” at National Tsing Hua University in 2012. It was also presented at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition at National Yang Ming University in 2014. Many thanks go out to Otávio Bueno, Nancy Cartwright, Carl F. Craver, Kai-Yuan Cheng, Jonathan Hricko, Wen-Fan Wang, Ruey-Yuan Wu, and other members of the audience for their valuable comments. Pemberton’s 2011 article attempts to integrate Cartwright’s and MDC’s accounts. His integration has inspired this paper to develop a new version. Special thanks go out to Otávio Bueno, Nancy Cartwright, Carl F. Craver, Lindley Darden, and John Pemberton for writing back their comments on different versions of this article after the 2012 conference. Their comments were of great help for the revision.
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Chen, RL. (2017). Mechanisms, Capacities, and Nomological Machines: Integrating Cartwright’s Account of Nomological Machines and Machamer, Darden and Craver’s Account of Mechanisms. In: Chao, HK., Reiss, J. (eds) Philosophy of Science in Practice. Synthese Library, vol 379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45532-7_8
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