Elder-Vass on the Causal Power of Social Structures

Coleman’s Boat Revisited: Causal Sequences and the Micro-macro Link

“…Indeed, critical realists’ unwillingness to identify social entities themselves as anything other than “individuals and their organization” (see, e.g., the redescription principle in Elder-Vass [2010:24–25]) has made ontological individualists question whether causal powers holism actually differs from ontological individualism in any relevant sense 21 (Sawyer 2001:565 ff. ; Wahlberg 2014:777 ff. ).…”

Causally Redundant Social Objects

“…In fact, in my critical discussion (Hansson Wahlberg 2014), I looked at Elder-Vass's specific examples, where H is taken to be a social object, and I argued that in those cases, it is false to maintain that "the entities that are H's parts would not have this causal power if they were not organised into an H" because arguably the putative "parts" do not even actually compose an Third, the feared end-result -mereological nihilism -has to my knowledge not been shown to be a theoretically untenable position. In fact, it is a theory with very prominent defenders.…”

“…Elder-Vass calls the powers that parts have collectively when and only when they are suitably interrelated weakly or relationally emergent properties (properties and powers are equated). The remaining powers of the interrelated parts, that is, the powers that they have collectively irrespectively of how they are interrelated (a class of powers that I suspect might be empty, see Hansson Wahlberg 2014), he calls resultant (Elder-Vass 2010, 17). Notice that the issue whether the powers of the whole and the powers of its interrelated parts are identical is different from -although importantly related with -the question whether the whole itself (the thing that allegedly has the powers) is identical with its interrelated parts.…”

“…Notice that the issue whether the powers of the whole and the powers of its interrelated parts are identical is different from -although importantly related with -the question whether the whole itself (the thing that allegedly has the powers) is identical with its interrelated parts. 3 But I was careful not to call such powers "strongly emergent" because I did not, and I still do not, see any reason to think that they must be unexplainable -see especially note 21 in Hansson Wahlberg (2014). ElderVass (2010, 30) takes "strongly emergent" to be a predicate true of a higher-level property whose existence is unexplainable in principle.…”

“…In my critical discussion (Hansson Wahlberg 2014), I tacitly conjectured that it was precisely to avoid this kind of predicament (discussed in Merricks 2001; see also Kim 2005) 9 It might be thought that by adopting the metaphysical framework of power causation one is already committed to the falsity of this principle (e.g., Harré and Madden 1975). But that is not necessarily so.…”