Causation at different levels: tracking the commitments of mechanistic explanations

Abstract

This paper tracks the commitments of mechanistic explanations focusing on the relation between activities at different levels. It is pointed out that the mechanistic approach is inherently committed to identifying causal connections at higher levels with causal connections at lower levels. For the mechanistic approach to succeed a mechanism as a whole must do the very same thing what its parts organised in a particular way do. The mechanistic approach must also utilise bridge principles connecting different causal terms of different theoretical vocabularies in order to make the identities of causal connections transparent.These general commitments get confronted with two claims made by certain proponents of the mechanistic approach: William Bechtel often argues that within the mechanistic framework it is possible to balance between reducing higher levels and maintaining their autonomy at the same time, whereas, in a recent paper, Craver and Bechtel argue that the mechanistic approach is able to make downward causation intelligible.The paper concludes that the mechanistic approach imbued with identity statements is no better candidate for anchoring higher levels to lower ones while maintaining their autonomy at the same time than standard reductive accounts are, and that what mechanistic explanations are able to do at best is showing that downward causation does not exist.

Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness

“…For instance, Eronen ([2011Eronen ([ ], §10, [2012), Glennan ([1996], pp. 61-2), and Kistler ([2009]) favor a pluralistic ontology that comprises both macro and micro properties, while Fazekas and Kertesz ([2011]) and Soom ([2012]) advance the ontological reducibility of the former to the latter. By contrast, most mechanists sidestep metaphysical issues because they take the framework to be metaphysically neutral (see, for example, Craver [2007b], p. 196).…”

Can parts cause their wholes?

“…14 In the case of bridge-collapse we are not considering whether some event identical with it was its cause, as we might be if considering whether the entire sum of parts were its cause (see Fazekas and Kertész 2011). Instead, we are considering specifically whether U10-failure was its cause.…”

Are Higher Mechanistic Levels Causally Autonomous?

“…Mechanistic explanations dominate the biological and life sciences (Craver 2007; Darden 2013), are also important in the physical and engineering sciences (Glennan and Illari, 2018), and are even claimed to be able to contribute to our understanding of causation (Glennan 1996(Glennan , 2010(Glennan , 2017. Nevertheless, the ontological commitments and metaphysical implications of the mechanistic framework are far from being clear (Fazekas and Kertész 2011;Soom 2012;Rosenberg 2015;Eronen 2015;Kaiser and Krickel 2016;Krickel 2019).…”

“…This question is hotly debated. On the one hand, it has recently been argued that the causal autonomy of higher-level entities is incompatible with some core commitments of the mechanistic approach (Fazekas and Kertész 2011;Soom 2012;Rosenberg 2015). On the other hand, William Bechtel routinely presents the mechanistic framework as one that is well equipped to ensure the autonomy of higher-level entities even in a strict causal sense (Bechtel 2007(Bechtel , 2008(Bechtel , 2009(Bechtel , 2017a(Bechtel , 2017bBechtel and Abrahamsen 2008).…”