Causally powerful processes

Abstract

Processes produce changes: rivers erode their banks and thunderstorms cause floods. If I am right that organisms are a kind of process, then the causally efficacious behaviours of organisms are also examples of processes producing change. In this paper I shall try to articulate a view of how we should think of causation within a broadly processual ontology of the living world. Specifically, I shall argue that causation, at least in a central class of cases, is the interaction of processes, that such causation is the exercise of a capacity inherent in that process and, negatively, that causation should not be understood as the instantiation of universal laws. The approach I describe has substantial similarities with the process causality articulated by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe for physical causation, making it plausible that the basic approach can be applied equally to the non-living world. It is an approach that builds at crucial points on the criticisms of determinism and universal causality famously articulated by Elizabeth Anscombe.

Scrutinizing microbiome determinism: why deterministic hypotheses about the microbiome are conceptually ungrounded

“…This led some authors to interpret that this discovery should have profound implications for our understanding of biological individuality (Gilbert et al, 2012 ; McFall-Ngai et al, 2013 ; Stencel & Proszewska, 2017 ; Suárez, 2018 ). For example, Dupré ( 2010 ) argued that organisms should now be conceived as polygenomic (de-essentialized) entities, whose expressed traits were highly indetermistic as they depended on the unfolding of several genomes (see also Dupré, 2021 ). However, contrary to the expectations, it led some to consider that the microbiome constitutes “a second genome”, serving as a source of genetic variation that could even hypothetically account for phenomena like the missing heritability problem (Sandoval-Motta et al, 2017 ).…”

Trust the process? Hyloenergeism and biological processualism

“…31–32; 2014a, p. 15, 2014c, p. 307, 2015, pp. 19–20, 2020, p. 99, 2021a, pp. 10668–10670, 2021b, pp.…”

“…Dupré also rejects the four‐dimensional picture of standard perdurantism according to which the past, present, and future all exist and in the same way in favor of a sort of “growing‐block perdurantism”, according to which the past and present exist, but not the future (Dupré, 2015, pp. 20–21, 2021a, p. 10674, fn. 7).…”

“…Those objects of our experience that we ordinarily take to be substances or things are in actuality relatively‐stabilized processes (Dupré, 2013, pp. 31–32, 2021a, pp. 10677–10668, 2021b, pp.…”

“…While Dupré's understanding of processes shares certain similarities with standard perdurantist approaches, Dupré rejects several key aspects of the standard perdurantist theory of persistence. According to Dupré, reality is irreducibly dynamic: though processes are temporally extended, 6 The articles, chapters, and books from which I will be drawing in presenting Dupré's account include: Dupré (2012); Bapteste and Dupré (2012); Dupré (2013); Dupré (2014a); Dupré (2014b); Dupré (2014c); Dupré (2015); Dupré and Guttinger (2016); Dupré and Nicholson (2018); Dupré (2020); Dupré (2021a); Dupré (2021b) and Dupré (2021c). 7 See, for example, the essays in included in Nicholson and Dupré (2018).…”