Interventionist Causal Exclusion and Non‐reductive Physicalism

The first part of this paper presents an argument showing that the currently most highly acclaimed interventionist theory of causation, i.e. the one advanced by Woodward, excludes supervening macro properties from having a causal influence on effects of their micro supervenience bases. Moreover, this interventionist exclusion argument is demonstrated to rest on weaker premises than classical exclusion arguments. The second part then discusses a weakening of interventionism that Woodward suggests. This weakened version of interventionism turns out either to be inapplicable to cases of downward causation involving supervening macro properties or to render corresponding causal claims meaningless. In sum, the paper argues that, contrary to what many non‐reductive physicalists claim, interventionism does not render non‐reductive physicalism immune to the problem of causal exclusion.     

Interventionism and Supervenience: A New Problem and Provisional Solution

The causal exclusion argument suggests that mental causes are excluded in favour of the underlying physical causes that do all the causal work. Recently, a debate has emerged concerning the possibility of avoiding this conclusion by adopting Woodward's interventionist theory of causation. Both proponents and opponents of the interventionist solution crucially rely on the notion of supervenience when formulating their positions. In this article, we consider the relation between interventionism and supervenience in detail and argue that importing supervenience relations into the interventionist framework is deeply problematic. However, rather than reject interventionist solutions to exclusion wholesale, we wish to propose that the problem lies with the concept of supervenience. This would open the door for a moderate defence of the interventionist solution to the exclusion argument.     

Exclusion,still not tracted

Karen Bennett has recently articulated and defended a “compatibilist” solution to the causal exclusion problem. Bennett’s solution works by rejecting the exclusion principle on the grounds that even though physical realizers are distinct from the mental states or properties that they realize, they necessarily co-occur such that they fail to satisfy standard accounts of causal over-determination. This is the case, Bennett argues, because the causal background conditions for core realizers being sufficient causes of their effects are identical to the “surround” conditions with which the core realizers are metaphysically sufficient the states or properties that they realize. Here we demonstrate that the background conditions for the causal sufficiency of core realizers for their effects are not identical to the core realizer’s surrounds, nor do backgrounds necessitate such surround conditions. If compatibilist solutions to exclusion can be defended, a different argument will be needed.     

Explanatory autonomy: the role of proportionality,stability, and conditional irrelevance

Synthese - This paper responds to recent criticisms of the idea that true causal claims, satisfying a minimal “interventionist” criterion for causation, can differ in the extent to...     

Does the Interventionist Notion of Causation Deliver Us from the Fear of Epiphenomenalism?

This article reviews the causal exclusion argument and confronts it with some recently proposed refutations based on the interventionist account of causation. I first show that there are several technical and interpretative difficulties in applying the interventionist account to the exclusion issue. Different ways of accommodating the two to one another are considered and all are shown to leave the issue without a fully satisfactory resolution. Lastly, I argue that, on the most consistent construal, the interventionist approach can provide grounds for thinking that higher-level causal notions are as legitimate as lower-level causal notions, but it does not provide grounds for postulating inter-level causal interactions.     

Laws,causality and the intentional explanation of action

Whether or not an intentional explanation of action necessarily involves law-like statements is related to another question, namely, is it a causal explanation? The Popper-Hempel Thesis, which answers both questions affirmatively, inevitably faces a dilemma between realistic and universalistic requirements. However, in terms of W.C. Salmon’s concept of causal explanation, intentional explanation can be a causal one even if it does not rely on any laws. Based on this, we are able to refute three characteristic arguments for the claim “reason is not a cause of action,” namely, the “proper logical” argument, the “logical relation” argument, and the “rule-following” argument. This rebuttal suggests that the causal relationship between reason and action can provide a justification for intentional explanations.     

Causal concepts and temporal ordering

Though common sense says that causes must temporally precede their effects, the hugely influential interventionist account of causation makes no reference to temporal precedence. Does common sense lead us astray? In this paper, I evaluate the power of the commonsense assumption from within the interventionist approach to causal modeling. I first argue that if causes temporally precede their effects, then one need not consider the outcomes of interventions in order to infer causal relevance, and that one can instead use temporal and probabilistic information to infer exactly when X is causally relevant to Y in each of the senses captured by Woodward’s interventionist treatment. Then, I consider the upshot of these findings for causal decision theory, and argue that the commonsense assumption is especially powerful when an agent seeks to determine whether so-called “dominance reasoning” is applicable.

     

Interventionism and Higher-level Causation

Several authors have recently claimed that the notorious causal exclusion problem, according to which higher-level causes are threatened with causal pre-emption by lower-level causes, can be avoided if causal relevance is understood in terms of Woodward's interventionist account of causation. They argue that if causal relevance is defined in interventionist terms, there are cases where only higher-level properties, but not the lower-level properties underlying them, qualify as causes of a certain effect. In this article, I show that the line of reasoning supposed to establish this claim does not succeed and that interventionism is not better capable of dealing with higher-level causal claims than other accounts of causation. According to Woodward, higher-level causal claims are nonetheless more adequate than lower-level ones if they describe a realization-independent dependency relationship and, hence, meet the requirement that causes should be proportional to their effects. I argue, however, that combining interventionism with proportionality considerations raises difficulties and that, therefore, Woodward's account does not vindicate higher-level causation.     

Counterfactuals and Causal Explanation

This article defends the use of interventionist counterfactuals to elucidate causal and explanatory claims against criticisms advanced by James Bogen and Peter Machamer. Against Bogen, I argue that counterfactual claims concerning what would happen under interventions are meaningful and have determinate truth values, even in a deterministic world. I also argue, against both Machamer and Bogen, that we need to appeal to counterfactuals to capture the notions like causal relevance and causal mechanism. Contrary to what both authors suppose, counterfactuals are not “unscientific”—a substantial tradition within statistics and the causal modelling literature makes heavy use of them.     

Rethinking the explanatory power of dynamical models in cognitive science

In this paper I offer an interventionist perspective on the explanatory structure and explanatory power of (some) dynamical models in cognitive science: I argue that some “pure” dynamical models – ones that do not refer to mechanisms at all – in cognitive science are “contextualized causal models” and that this explanatory structure gives such models genuine explanatory power. I contrast this view with several other perspectives on the explanatory power of “pure” dynamical models. One of the main results is that dynamical models need not refer to underlying mechanisms in order to be explanatory. I defend and illustrate this position in terms of dynamical models of the A-not-B error in developmental psychology as elaborated by Thelen and colleagues, and dynamical models of unintentional interpersonal coordination developed by Richardson and colleagues.     

How agency can solve interventionism’s problem of circularity

Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation is beset by a problem of circularity: the analysis of causes is in terms of interventions, and the analysis of interventions is in terms of causes. This is not in itself an argument against the correctness of the analysis. But by requiring us to have causal knowledge prior to making any judgements about causation, Woodward’s theory does make it mysterious how we can ever start acquiring causal knowledge. We present a solution to this problem by showing how the interventionist notion of causation can be rationally generated from a more primitive agency notion of causation. The agency notion is easily and non-circularly applicable, but fails when we attempt to capture causal relations between non-actions. We show that the interventionist notion of causation serves as an appropriate generalisation of the agency notion. Furthermore, the causal judgements based on the latter generally remain true when rephrased in terms of the former, which allows one to use the causal knowledge gained by applying the agency notion as a basis for applying Woodward’s interventionist theory. We then present an overview of relevant empirical evidence from developmental psychology which shows that our proposed rational reconstruction lines up neatly with the actual development of causal reasoning in children. This gives additional plausibility to our proposal. The article thus provides a solution to one of the main problems of interventionism while keeping Woodward’s analysis intact.     

Causal Exclusion and Multiple Realizations

A critical analysis of recent interventionist responses to the causal exclusion problem is presented. It is argued that the response can indeed offer a solution to the problem, but one that is based on renouncing the multiple realizability thesis. The account amounts to the rejection of nonreductive physicalism and would thus be unacceptable to many. It is further shown that if the multiple realizability thesis is brought back in and conjoined with the interventionist notion of causation, inter-level causation is ruled out altogether.     

Functions and emergence: when functional properties have something to say

In a recent paper, Bird (in: Groff (ed.) Revitalizing causality: Realism about causality in philosophy and social science, 2007) has argued that some higher-order properties—which he calls “evolved emergent properties”—can be considered causally efficacious in spite of exclusion arguments. I have previously argued in favour of a similar position. The basic argument is that selection processes do not take physical categorical properties into account. Rather, selection mechanisms are only tuned to what such properties can do, i.e., to their causal powers. This picture seems ultimately untenable in the light of further exclusion problems; but at the same time, it meets our explanatory demands. My purpose is therefore to show that there is a real antinomy with regard to evolved emergent properties. I develop a physicalist exclusion argument and then I go on to consider an argument that seems to establish that evolved emergent properties are causally efficacious, and propose a compatibilist solution. Finally, I very briefly consider what the proposed model may imply for the issue of mental causation.     

Between mechanical clocks and emergent flocks: complexities in biology

Even though complexity is a concept that is ubiquitously used by biologists and philosophers of biology, it is rarely made precise. I argue that a clarification of the concept is neither trivial nor unachievable, and I propose a unifying framework based on the technical notion of “effective complexity” that allows me to do justice to conflicting intuitions about biological complexity, while taking into account several distinctions in the usage of the concept that are often overlooked. In particular, I propose a distinction between two kinds of complexity, “mechanical” and “emergent”, which can be understood as different ways of relating the effective complexity of mechanisms and of behaviors in biological explanations. I illustrate the adequacy of this framework by discussing different attempts to understand intracellular organization in terms of pathways and networks. My framework provides a different way of thinking about recent philosophical debates, for example, on the difference between mechanistic and topological explanations and about the concept of emergence. Moreover, it can contribute to a proper assessment of metascientific arguments that invoke biological complexity.

     

Causalité juridique et imputabilité médicale : l’incidence de l’approche juridique du lien de causalité sur la pratique expertale en droit de la réparation du dommage corporel

Traditionally, a “direct and certain” causal link was required between fault and harm in order to engage an individual's compensatory liability. However, upon reading case law, it is possible to note that causality no longer necessarily has to be either direct or certain. Indeed, although the presence of a previous condition long enabled the exclusion of a direct link between a harmful event and its aftereffects, the French Court of Appeal (Cour de Cassation) now considers that pathological predispositions must no longer be taken into account (in respect of an exclusion or a reduction in the right to compensation) if these were latent, and only revealed by the harmful event. Similarly, on occasion the plaintiffs support their claims with bundles of evidence and arguments that can but force magistrates to set aside the absence of absolute certainty on a scientific level. Presumptions of accountability have even been put forward in some areas of personal injury compensation (traffic accidents and workplace accidents). The conduct and content of forensic expertises are then disrupted, both for the expert and for the victim's lawyer.     

Suicide Causation: Pies,Paths, and Pointless Polemics

Most people readily agree that suicide is caused by a complex web of many different factors. However, for many people the concept of a single event resulting from the combined effect of a constellation of different factors (multiple causation) is imperfectly understood. Unfortunately, a naive understanding of multiple causation can lead to needless arguments about what “really” causes suicide, and pointless debate about the “right” point for preventive intervention. In this paper, I review several simple conceptual models of multiple causation as they relate to suicide prevention. I suggest that a more explicit understanding of the nature of multiple causation has the potential to obviate some of these misguided arguments and to facilitate cooperative prevention efforts among person who choose to apply their energies at different points in the causal chain of suicide.     

Causal Exclusion and Causal Bayes Nets

In this paper I reconstruct and evaluate the validity of two versions of causal exclusion arguments within the theory of causal Bayes nets. I argue that supervenience relations formally behave like causal relations. If this is correct, then it turns out that both versions of the exclusion argument are valid when assuming the causal Markov condition and the causal minimality condition. I also investigate some consequences for the recent discussion of causal exclusion arguments in the light of an interventionist theory of causation such as Woodward's ( 2003 ) and discuss a possible objection to my causal Bayes net reconstruction.     

Determination,realization and mental causation

How can mental properties bring about physical effects, as they seem to do, given that the physical realizers of the mental goings-on are already sufficient to cause these effects? This question gives rise to the problem of mental causation (MC) and its associated threats of causal overdetermination, mental causal exclusion, and mental causal irrelevance. Some (e.g., Cynthia and Graham Macdonald, and Stephen Yablo) have suggested that understanding mental-physical realization in terms of the determinable/determinate relation (henceforth, ‘determination’) provides the key to solving the problem of MC: if mental properties are determinables of their physical realizers, then (since determinables and determinates are distinct, yet don’t causally compete) all three threats may be avoided. Not everyone agrees that determination can do this good work, however. Some (e.g., Douglas Ehring, Eric Funkhauser, and Sven Walter) object that mental-physical realization can’t be determination, since such realization lacks one or other characteristic feature of determination. I argue that on a proper understanding of the features of determination key to solving the problem of MC these arguments can be resisted.     

Normative roles,conceptual variance,and ardent realism about normativity

ABSTRACT

In Choosing Normative Concepts, Eklund considers a “variance thesis” about our most fundamental (and seemingly most “authoritative”) normative concepts. This thesis raises the threat of an alarming symmetry between different sets of normative concepts. If this symmetry holds, it would be incompatible with “ardent realism” about normativity. Eklund argues that the ardent realist should appeal to the idea of “referential normativity” in response to this challenge. I argue that, even if Eklund is right in his core arguments on this front, many other important challenges for ardent realism remain that also stem from the issues about possible variance in normative concepts that he considers. Following this, I introduce further issues about conceptual variance. These are issues that arise within the context of the framework that Eklund proposes the ardent realist use to confront the variance theses he considers. In particular, the issues concern what normative role as such is, as well as, relatedly, which roles associated with a concept (or predicate) get to count as part of its normative role. The upshot is that issues about conceptual variance in normative domains might be even more challenging for the ardent realist to deal with than Eklund argues.