Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance

Abstract

Constitutive mechanistic explanations are said to refer to mechanisms that constitute the phenomenon-to-be-explained. The most prominent approach of how to understand this constitution relation is Carl Craver's mutual manipulability approach to constitutive relevance. Recently, the mutual manipulability approach has come under attack (Leuridan 2012;Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015;Romero 2015;Harinen 2014;Casini and Baumgartner 2016). Roughly, it is argued that this approach is inconsistent because it is spelled out in terms of interventionism (which is an approach to causation), whereas constitutive relevance is said to be a non-causal relation. In this paper, I will discuss a strategy of how to resolve this inconsistency, so-called fat-handedness approaches (Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015;Casini and Baumgartner 2016;Romero 2015). I will argue that these approaches are problematic. I will present a novel suggestion of how to consistently define constitutive relevance in terms of interventionism. My approach is based on a causal interpretation of mutual manipulability, where manipulability is interpreted as a causal relation between the mechanism's components and temporal parts of the phenomenon.

The Extended Mind: State of the Question

“…Others, in an attempt to save the strict distinction, propose to redefine intervention as “fat handed,” where fat‐handed intervention means that the wiggling of macro and micro levels is a wiggling of both simultaneously by one common cause, and not via interlevel causation (Baumgartner and Gebharter ). One problem with this proposal is that the notion of fat‐handed intervention is unable to distinguish between accidental changes in the system and changes that indicate constitutive relations, or between top‐down and bottom‐up interventions since such interventions simultaneously affect both levels (Krickel ).…”

“…Enactivism also offers strong support for the concept of body-environment coupling characterized as involving reciprocal causal dynamics. Putatively, it presents a case for a dynamical conception of constitution that a makes the C-C fallacy objection irrelevant by favoring an interpretation of mutual manipulability as reflecting a causal intervention across dynamical, nonlinear time scales, an interpretation close to the views of Kaplan (2012), Kirchhoff (2016), and Krickel (2017).…”

“…A third possible strategy is to introduce a more realistic supposition about the temporal nature of the system as a whole, in a way that points to a more dynamical conception of constitution closer to extended and enactivist views of mind (e.g., Krickel 2017). On this view MM may test a form of interlevel causal relations that operate between working parts on the microlevel at time t 1 and a macrolevel temporal part at time t 2 (assuming S ψ-ing is realistically understood as itself a temporal process).…”

Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of the new mechanists

“…One way to do so is to view mutual manipulability as only an epistemic criterion for when it is apt to believe that a part is a working part. On this view, Craver's appropriation of the formal 19 My exegesis in this subsection owes much to Romero (2015) and Krickel (2018). 20 It should be noted that Woodward does not explicitly endorse this view: cf.…”

“…Thus another response to the tension between C1-C3 is to try to maintain the spirit of all three claims, with suitable tweaks. This is the strategy pursued by Krickel (2018). Krickel takes C3 to be non-negotiable.…”