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New Mechanism and Causality: The Case of Interactive Causal Pluralism

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Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 77(4):1175-1208

DOI:10.17990/RPF/2021_77_4_1175

Authors:

Nicolaus Copernicus University

This paper focuses on the causal pluralism that emerges from the new mechanistic discussion on causality. The reason for our choice of the New Mechanical Philosophy (NMP) is twofold. Firstly, the NMP is one of the dominant approaches within the current philosophy of science and has produced very extensive literature on the problem of causation. Secondly, the intersection of the understanding of nature via mechanisms and the focus on explanatory practice across different scientific fields has brought a great renewal of causal explanations within the mechanistic framework. After characterizing the four dominant approaches to causation present in the NMP, we argue that each approach gives an important insight into the philosophical discussion about causality, but at the same time presents certain limitations. The main philosophical issues and their internal problems with respect to each approach are discussed, and in the following sections, we explicate the similarities and differences between those approaches. In the final section, we address the issue of causal pluralism and argue that the new mechanical approach to causation deserves its own place in the debate on causality, since it is an interesting case of interactive pluralism with respect to causality.

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Revista Portuguesa de Filosoa, 2021, Vol. 77 (4): 37-70.

DOI https://doi.org/10.17990/RPF/2021_77_4_0000

37-70

ISSN: 0870-5283

ISSN: 2183-461X

New Mechanism and Causality: The Case of Interactive

Causal Pluralism

MICHAŁ OLEKSOWICZ

Abstract

This paper focuses on the causal pluralism that emerges from the new mechanistic

discussion on causality. The reason for our choice of the New Mechanical Philosophy (NMP)

is twofold. Firstly, the NMP is one of the dominant approaches within the current philosophy

of science and has produced very extensive literature on the problem of causation. Secondly,

the intersection of the understanding of nature via mechanisms and the focus on explanatory

practice across different scientic elds has brought a great renewal of causal explanations

within the mechanistic framework. After characterizing the four dominant approaches to

causation present in the NMP, we argue that each approach gives an important insight into

the philosophical discussion about causality, but at the same time presents certain limitations.

The main philosophical issues and their internal problems with respect to each approach

are discussed, and in the following sections, we explicate the similarities and differences

between those approaches. In the nal section, we address the issue of causal pluralism and

argue that the new mechanical approach to causation deserves its own place in the debate

on causality, since it is an interesting case of interactive pluralism with respect to causality.

Keywords: causal explanation, causation, interactive causal pluralism, mechanistic

explanation, new mechanical philosophy.

1. Introduction

The idea of “mechanism” as the basic building block of the physical

world (Descartes) is one of the crucial concepts which have inuenced

the evolution of scientic disciplines and scientic practice. R. Boyle,

R. Descartes, and H. More invoked the notion of “mechanical philosophy”

in reference to a philosophical view of nature as a machine. “Mechanism”

was the focal point of their philosophies, even though historians would later

demonstrate the complexity of such a concept. Moreover, the very idea of

mechanism referred, on the one hand, to mechanical machines and the

science of mechanics (Benedetti, Tartaglia, Guidobaldo del Monte) as well

as to a method of scientic investigation (i.e., discussion of processes built

from an assemblage of parts, as in the works of, e.g., M. Malpighi and R.

Hooke), and on the other hand, mechanism was regarded as a metaphysical

doctrine (due to its focus on corpuscles, parts, and machine-likeness).1

* Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland.

 michaloleksowicz@umk.pl

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5591-0579

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The concept of mechanism is once again at the center of the phil-

osophical debate about science with the New Mechanical Philosophy

(NMP).2 This approach is a novel revision of its modern antecedents, char-

acterized by both continuity and discontinuity with the earlier philosophy:

continuity, because the NMP takes into account phenomena explained in

terms of size, shape, and motion and because it interprets mechanism as a

metaphysical concept; and discontinuity, because the NMP explains nature

as being made up of complex systems, described by universal laws, and

irreducible to systems composed of just a few elements. The NMP offers

an overview of various methodologies employed in different sciences (e.g.,

cognitive science, medicine, epidemiology, physics, social sciences, etc.),

taking into account the concept of “mechanisms” in its ontic and epis-

temic aspects (C. Craver, S. Glennan). According to mechanists, the idea of

ontic mechanisms as complex causal systems and epistemic mechanisms

as heuristic tools for discovering such complex systems in the world is

a crucial one. As a consequence, the NMP stands interestingly between

the methodologies of the life sciences and the mathematical and physical

sciences, although it investigates nature through the explanatory demands

specic to particular scientic elds.

In the current philosophical literature dedicated to the issue of

causality, there is a debate on the great diversity of causal concepts.3 This

1. Marie Boas [Hall], “The Establishment of the Mechanical Philosophy,” Osiris 10

(1952): 412–541; Dennis Des Chene, “Mechanisms of Life in the Seventeenth Century:

Borelli, Perrault, Regis,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical

Sciences 36 (2005): 245–260; Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World

Picture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961);Daniel Garber and Sophie Roux (eds.), The

Mechanization of Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013); Domenico Bertoloni

Meli, Mechanism: A Visual, Lexical, and Conceptual History (Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, 2019); Gregor Schiemann, “Old and New Mechanistic Ontologies,”

in Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond. European Studies in Philosophy

of Science, vol.11, eds. Brigitte Falkenburg and Gregor Schiemann (Cham: Springer,

2019), 33–46; Kari L. Theurer, “Seventeenth-Century Mechanism: An Alternative

Framework for Reductionism,” Philosophy of Science 80 (2013): 907–918.

2. Stathis Psillos, “The idea of mechanism,” in Causality in the Sciences, eds. Phyllis

McKay Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011), 771-788.

3. Ned Hall, “Two Concepts of Causation,” in Causation and Counterfactuals, eds. John

Collins, Ned Hall, and Laurie Paul (Cambridge MA–London: MIT Press, 2000),

225–276; Christopher Hitchcock, “How to be a Causal Pluralist,” in Thinking about

Causes. From Greek Philosophy to Modern Physics, eds. Peter Machamer and Gereon

Wolters (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 200–221; Nancy Cartwright,

“Causation: One Word, Many Things,” Philosophy of Science 71, no.5 (2004): 805–

819; Raffaella Campaner and Maria C. Galavotti, “Plurality in Causality.” in Thinking

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New Mechanism and Causality: The Case of Interactive Causal Pluralism

Revista Portuguesa de Filosoa, Vol. 77, No. 4 (2021): -70

paper, however, is not structured around a complete taxonomy of causal

pluralism and instead focuses on the causal pluralism that emerges from

the new mechanistic discussion on causality. The reason for our choice

of the New Mechanical Philosophy (NMP) is twofold. Firstly, the NMP is

one of the dominant approaches within the current philosophy of science

and has produced very extensive literature on the problem of causation.

Secondly, the intersection of the understanding of nature via mechanisms

and the focus on explanatory practice across different scientic elds has

brought a great renewal of causal explanations within the mechanistic

framework.

We will begin with a brief commentary on why causation has been

put at the core of the new mechanistic agenda. Then, we will characterize

the four approaches to causation present in the NMP. It is our argument

that each approach gives an important insight into the philosophical

discussion about causality, but at the same time presents certain limita-

tions. Therefore, we will discuss the main philosophical issues and their

internal problems for each approach, and in the following sections, we will

explicate the similarities and differences between and the limitations of

the previously presented approaches. In the nal section, we will address

the issue of causal pluralism and argue that the new mechanical approach

to causation deserves its own place in the debate on causality, since it is an

interesting case of interactive pluralism in causality.

2. Causation revisited

One of the main reasons why the philosophical debate on causation

has been reignited is probably the fact that causal explanation was not

successfully absorbed by C. Hempel’s account of explanation.4 His phil-

about Causes. From Greek Philosophy to Modern Physics, eds. Peter Machamer, Gereon

Wolters (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 178–199; Peter Godfrey-

Smith, “Causal Pluralism”, in The Oxford Handbook of Causation, eds. H. Beebee et

al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 326–337; Michał Oleksowicz, “In search

of the person. Towards a real revolution,” Scientia et Fides 6, no.1 (2018): 229–262,

http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2016.008; Stephen H. Kellert, Helen E. Longino, and

C. Kenneth Wathers (eds.), Scientic Pluralism. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of

Science, vol. XIX (Minneapolis–London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

4. Carl Gustav Hempel, Aspects of Scientic Explanation and other Essays in the

Philosophy of Science (New York: The Free Press, 1965); Wesley Salmon, Causality

and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mariusz Tabaczek, “The

Role of Causality in Scientic Models of Explanation in the Context of the Retrieval of

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osophical interests were rmly rooted in the empiricist project to demy-

stify the metaphysical concept of causality and model it on relations of

deductive entailment, which is consistent with the idea that the best causal

explanations are based on physical theories of a deterministic character.

Contrary to the Hempelian “received view,” mechanistic philosophers

focused their attention on different ways of describing natural phenomena

and on the structure of explanation in science. In fact, the mechanistic

literature of the 1993–2000 period began with the observation that the

standard philosophy of science did not say a word about mechanisms.

In their seminal work, Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver

dened mechanisms as “entities and activities organized such that they

are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to nish or termi-

nation conditions.”5 Even if mechanists have disagreed with one another

on how to precisely dene mechanisms, the common denominator of

their approaches is the conviction that the study of mechanisms is strictly

interwoven with mechanistic explanation, which involves isolating a set of

phenomena (i.e., an entity or system that is engaged in a certain activity)

and positing a mechanism that is capable of producing those phenomena.6

As a consequence, the basic account of mechanistic explanation differs

from the aforementioned Hempelian deductive-nomological account.

For instance, Jon Williamson denes the mechanistic theory of causality

as one that claims the existence of a metaphysical connection such that

“two events are causally connected if and only if they are connected by an

underlying physical mechanism of the appropriate sort.”7 This denition

means that “on the one hand our knowledge of underlying mechanisms

guides our causal ascriptions, while on the other, evidence of causal rela-

tionships helps us discover mechanisms.”8 Causality has been unpacked

the Classical Concept of Divine Action,” Scientia et Fides 8, no.1 (2020): 43–75, http://

dx.doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2020.010.

5. Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, and Carl Craver, “Thinking About Mechanisms,”

Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): 3.

6. Phyllis McKay Illari and Jon Williamson, “Mechanisms are real and local,” in Causality

in the Sciences, eds. Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2011), 818–844; Phyllis McKay Illari and Jon Williamson,

“What is a mechanism? Thinking about mechanisms across the Sciences,” European

Journal for Philosophy of Science 2, no.1 (2012): 119–135.

7. Jon Williamson, “Mechanistic Theories of Causality Part I,” Philosophy Compass 6

(2011): 421.

8. Williamson, “Mechanistic Theories,” 421.

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by mechanists in four major ways.9 In the next section, we will expand on

these different approaches to causality and then draw some conclusions

from our analyses.

3. “Disenchanted” causality

3.1 The processual approach

The processual approach goes back to Wesley Salmon (1925–2001),

who, unlike Hempel, developed a concept of explanation according to

which to explain does not mean to subsume the explanandum under

general laws, but rather to exhibit the causal mechanisms responsible for

the occurrence of phenomena. In his conceptual work, Salmon on the

one hand attempted to take Hume’s challenge seriously by looking for a

physical connection between cause and effect, and on the other hand, he

developed the original version of empiricism. Its originality consists in

the fact that according to Salmon, the causal structure of the world can

be described within a double perspective, that is, by means of aleatory

causality (formulated in terms of interactions and processes) and statis-

tical causality (formulated in terms of statistical relations).10 The former

perspective is focused primarily on causal mechanisms and traces back

the history of events after their occurrence, while the latter provides a

good basis for the prediction of events.

The key concept of Salmon’s theory of probabilistic causality is

the notion of causal process, whereby “a process that transmits its own

structure is capable of propagating a causal inuence from one space-time

locale to another.”11 According to the philosopher, the propagation of

causal inuence by means of a causal process constitutes the mysterious

connection between cause and effect that Hume sought. Processes are

responsible for causal propagation and provide the link between cause

9. Carl F. Craver and James Tabery, “Mechanisms in Science,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia

of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/

entries/science-mechanisms/; Lucas J. Matthews and James Tabery, “Mechanisms

and the metaphysics of causation,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and

Mechanical Philosophy, eds. Stuart Glennan and Phyllis Illari (London–New York:

Routledge, 2018), 131–143.

10. Wesley Salmon, Scientic Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton–

New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).

11. Salmon, Scientic Explanation, 155.

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and effect. A typical example of a causal process is where a baseball moves

through space and then collides with another ball in the air. The collision

of the two balls is a paradigmatic causal interaction (“action by contact”)

with no spatiotemporal gaps in the transmission of causal inuence from

one ball to the other. Since not all processes are causal, Salmon introduced

the mark method to distinguish causal processes from pseudo-processes.

For Salmon, causal processes are characterized by the ability to

transmit marks. To have a more precise idea of what a mark is, we must

note that rstly, a given process, whether it be causal or pseudo, exhibits

a certain structure, and secondly, “if a process – causal process – is trans-

mitting its own structure, then it will be capable of transmitting certain

modications in that structure.”12 This means that for Salmon, the trans-

mission of a process’s own structure (i.e., its self-persistence or self-de-

termination) is not enough to characterize the process as causal. Namely,

even the successive positions occupied by the shadow of a moving plane

exhibit the transmission of a certain structure, that is, the particular shape

of the shadow. The process is causal if it is capable of marking, that is,

transmitting modications of its structure. The shadow of the plane, even

if marked when it intersects with an airport sign, does not get transmitted

beyond the point of the intersection. In other words, after the intersection,

its changed shape is restored to the original form.

Another key concept closely related to that of process is causal

production. The latter takes place whenever there is a causal interaction,

and the changes in the structure of processes continue to be propagated

until another interaction takes place. In his probabilistic analysis, Salmon

adopted the idea of interactive forks (which indicate the statistical depen-

dence between two effects) to describe cases of intersection of processes.

The best way to look at interactive forks is in terms of spatiotemporal

intersections of processes, whereby two causal processes after inter-

section undergo correlated modications that persist. Salmon calls this

kind of intersection “causal interaction.” Salmon’s principles of causal

process, production, and interaction have their theoretical background in

the theory of the continuous nature of change and motion.13

The new mechanistic framework of causality is much indebted to

Salmon’s mechanistic account, even if mechanists do not, or rarely do, refer

12. Salmon, Scientic Explanation, 144.

13. Wesley Salmon, “The Causal Structure of the World,” Metatheoria 1, no.1 (2010): 1–13.

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to Salmon’s works.14 In fact, Salmon’s focus on causal process, production,

and interaction is highly compatible with the new mechanistic emphasis

on productive spatiotemporal continuity (understood as the transmission

of matter/energy from cause to effect via a causal process), the parts of

mechanisms that produce a given behavior by interacting with each other,

and the causal mechanisms that make up the complex nexus of the worldly

causal structure.

We cannot ignore the fact that the NMP has not only brought back

the concept of causation to the philosophical mainstream, but also pushed

forward an animated debate on the character of scientic explanation:

the so-called ontic–epistemic debate.15 We do not wish to enter into that

debate here as we believe that it deserves a separate paper, but we would

like to conclude by noting that Salmon’s account of causality and his ontic

conception of scientic explanation (whereby to explain a phenomenon is

to show how it ts into a causal nexus) have deeply inuenced the meta-

physical and epistemological approach to causality as present within the

NMP, that is, the new mechanistic focus on causal processes/interactions,

and the discussion on the main tenets of mechanistic explanation.

3.2 The activity-based approach

The activity-based approach embraces the Anscombian view that

causation should be understood in terms of productive activities.16 As

expressed in Machamer, Darden, and Craver’s denition, activities are

types of causings, because specic activities indicate how and under

what conditions mechanisms bring about their phenomena. According to

this approach, mechanisms can be classied by the kinds of activities/

operations/interactions in which parts of these mechanisms engage. For

instance, mechanistic explanation in neuroscience includes various activ-

ities (opening, clamping, diffusing, priming, fusing) and entities (Ca2+

channels, Ca2+ ions, fusion pores, neural membranes).17 According to

14. Raffaella Campaner, “Mechanistic and Neo-mechanistic Accounts of Causation: How

Salmon Already Got (Much of) It Right,” Metatheoria 3, no.2 (2013): 81–98.

15. Wesley Salmon, Causality and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press,

1998), 68–69; Cory Wright, “Mechanistic Explanation Without the Ontic Conception,”

European Journal of Philosophy of Science 2, no.3 (2012): 375–394.

16. Gertrude E. M. Anscombe, “Causality and Determination,” in Causation, eds. Ernest

Sosa and Michael Tooley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1971] 1993), 88–104.

17. Carl F. Craver, Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–6.

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mechanists, “activities are the producers of change. They are constitutive

of the transformations that yield new states of affairs or new products.”18

Activities are thought to be active rather than passive, and this active/

dynamic nature of activities makes them indispensable in speaking about

the activeness of mechanisms. Activities induce causal changes in entities

endowed with properties, meaning that they are a certain kind of process

that involves changes over time (as is the case, for example, with protein

synthesis or neurotransmission processes). Activities are individuated by

their spatiotemporal location and duration, by the types of entities that

can engage in them, by the start-up conditions that enable them, and by

their mode of operation, polarity, energy requirements, and range.19

From a metaphysical point of view, there has been a long-lasting

debate among mechanists whether it is entities or activities that should

be treated as primary, or whether they are on a par. Hence, on the one

hand, there are the so-called dualists (P. Machamer, L. Darden, C. Craver)

for whom activities and entities are on a par. On the other hand, there

are monists (S. Glennan) for whom entities take precedence over activ-

ities. However, it seems that both stances can be reconciled, and if they

are, then the emerging picture of the activity-based approach becomes

more coherent. So, rst we would like to shed some light on the possible

reconciliation via the concept of “interactivity,” and then come back to the

proper content of the activity-based approach to causation.

By introducing the concept of “interactivity,” J. Tabery evidences the

important, complementary elements of the monist and dualist views.20 It

seems that dualists are right to argue for the need to capture the dynamic

activity of mechanisms. The activity as the dynamic process of bringing

about, however, is not sufcient to capture the behavior of mechanisms.

In fact, the activity is only productive when it is embedded in a particular

mechanism, and this embedding requires – as suggested by the monist

account of interaction – specic property changes. The complementarity

of these two approaches is fundamentally based on the fact that the

18. Machamer, Darden, and Craver, “Thinking About Mechanisms,” 4.

19. Peter Machamer, “Activities and Causation: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of

Mechanisms,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18 (2004): 27–39; Carl

F. Craver and Lindley Darden, In Search of Mechanisms. Discoveries across the Life

Sciences (Chicago–London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16–20; Jim Bogen,

“Causally productive activities,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39

(2008): 112–123.

20. James G. Tabery, “Synthesizing Activities and Interactions in the Concept of a

Mechanism,” Philosophy of Science 71 (2004): 1–15.

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concept of activity (productivity) becomes specied by reference to the

particular property changes in the particular mechanism. Thus, Tabery’s

reconciliation of the two approaches reects the fact that each of them

has provided an important element to the current understanding of mech-

anism.

The activity-based approach to causation is largely focused on the

productive nature of causal mechanisms. The conceptual pair of activity–

entity points to the complex organization and dynamic character of a

mechanistic system, spatiotemporally located in its environment. In other

terms, it emphasizes the exercise of causal powers or causal efcacy in

the natural phenomena. In his recent book, S. Glennan signals the close

relationship between activities and powers or capacities by arguing that

“the central difference between activities and powers is that activities

are actual doings, while powers express capacities or dispositions not

yet manifested.”21 This remark reminds us that activities are powerful,

that they are things that an entity does. Glennan therefore focuses on the

conceptual pair of actuality and potentiality to do/produce something. The

introduction of the metaphysical categories of potency and act – under-

lying every being and the changes to which what exists is subject – seems

therefore to invoke the classical concepts of Aristotelian philosophy. Thus,

it is not the dualist metaphysics of activities and entities (raising the

question of what is more fundamental), but the metaphysical categories

of potency and act as the intrinsic constitution of being itself that are at

the core of the activity-based (dynamic) character of causation.

One can raise the objection that this sort of conceptual analysis on

causality does not seem to be in touch with scientic practice. In fact, it is

not clear whether this view gives any clue to the discovery of causal rela-

tions submerged in the complex nexus of worldly interactions. Instead, it

seems to be a post factum description of causation previously individuated

via different epistemic practices. This limited range of application of the

activity-based approach (from the point of view of scientic practice) to

the discovery of causal relations is the reason for the major success of the

difference-making approach.

21. Stuart Glennan, The New Mechanical Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2017), 32.

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3.3 The difference-making approach

In the 1990s, different manipulationist approaches to causation

(also known as agency or interventionist approaches) were elaborated,

of particular importance being those by P. Menzies and H. Price. The

general idea of causation in the agency and interventionist theories is that

causal relationships are relationships which are potentially exploitable

for purposes of manipulation and control.22 In other words, if c causes

e, then if c was to be manipulated in the right way, there should be an

associated change in e. This account, of particular signicance to future

studies on causation, was criticized for its excessive anthropocentricism,

since it focused on the means–end relation that links (human) agency with

the concept of causation. Subsequently, in order to avoid some pitfalls of

agency theories, J. Woodward and other philosophers adhered to a coun-

terfactual formulation of the manipulability theory. Their contribution

has undoubtedly inuenced the mechanistic thinking about causation and

explanation according to the notion of difference-making.23

Currently, as the pre-eminent counterfactual theorist, Woodward

offers an account of causation based on the idea of counterfactual manip-

ulation and, at the same time, actively participates in the debate on the

strengths and weaknesses of the mechanistic agenda.24 While the differ-

ence-making approach expressed by Woodward invokes the idea of inter-

vention (manipulation), his account does not make any special reference

to human agents and their manipulative activities. He argues that “an

intervention on some variable X with respect to some second variable Y is

a causal process that changes X in an appropriately exogenous way, so that

if a change in Y occurs, it occurs only in virtue of the change in X and not

as a result of some other set of causal factors.”25

22. James Woodward, “Causation and Manipulability,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/

entries/causation-mani/.

23. Peter Menzies and Helen Beebee, “Counterfactual Theories of Causation,” in The

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta,

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/.

24. James Woodward, “Explanation and Invariance in the Special Sciences,” British

Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51, no. 2 (2000): 197–254; James Woodward,

“What Is a Mechanism? A Counterfactual Account,” Philosophy of Science 69 (2002):

S366–S377; James Woodward, Making Things Happen. A Theory of Causal Explanation

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

25. Woodward, “Explanation and Invariance,” 199–200.

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According to this view, causal claims involve some kind of comparison

between what happens in a situation in which a cause is present and a

situation in which the cause is absent or different. Thus, the claim that

c causes e points beyond the local, actual situation in which c and e

occur, and has implications for what would happen in alternative situa-

tions. Moreover, since these accounts emphasize the role of covariational

or contingency evidential information in causal claims (i.e., correla-

tions among different values of variables that are candidates for causal

relata), these accounts are very useful in explicating cases where causal

claims refer to some repeatable type of property or magnitude (variable)

that is causally relevant to another. On the contrary, process theories –

mainly centered around an appropriate connecting process or mechanism

between causes and effects – do not focus primarily on the comparative

idea of causation. In other words, processual accounts treat causation as

a local and intrinsic relation which depends on what is actually true of the

particular occasion, whereas difference-making accounts concentrate on

the realm of modal or counterfactual considerations.

The application of Woodward’s framework to the NMP has deeply

inuenced the manner of thinking about mechanisms. Here, we would

like to emphasize at least two crucial impacts of Woodward’s account: the

debate on causal models and the mutual manipulability account.

The debate on the causal models of mechanisms points out that

a model cannot merely mirror a mechanism’s behavior: it also has to

represent the mechanism’s parts and activities and their organization. As

Woodward rightly notes, in order to represent and explain how a complex

causal process produces a phenomenon of interest in virtue of its parts

and their organized interactions, a model is required that is similar to

its target not only in terms of its overall behavior, but also in terms of its

structure (the case of inner modularity).

The case of mechanistic models (that is, mechanistic parts and their

functional arrangement) is linked to the animated debate on C. Craver’s

account of constitutive relevance.26 The latter concerns an issue which

is crucial to the NMP, namely that of how the activities of mechanistic

parts make a difference to the activities of wholes. On the one hand, this

account attempts to deal with the problem of causal relevance (i.e., how

causes make a difference to their effects) in the context of mechanistic

organization, and on the other, it endeavors to offer an essential method

26. Craver, Explaining the Brain, 139–160.

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for the identication of working constituents of a mechanism. At this

point, we would like to stress the fact that, according to Craver, it is the

mutual manipulability relation that should be employed to show that a

given part of the mechanism under examination is the one relevant to a

given activity. The language used by Craver concerns an epistemological

rather than metaphysical point of view. Craver’s focus is largely on the

experimental methods that researchers have for establishing causal rele-

vance, and his understanding of mutual manipulability and constitutive

relevance is largely dependent on the notion of intervention as dened by

Woodward.

One could easily object that the difference-making account – with its

different elaborations – is obviously not a metaphysical understanding of

causation, but rather one that deals with our different modes of thinking

of causation or attends more to the epistemology of causation than to

metaphysics. Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that counterfactuals

are inserted into the core of the NMP discourse on strategies devised to

understand the complex organization of mechanisms. Counterfactuals

seem to have the resources needed to shed some light on the problem

of mechanistic organization. Moreover, they allow a comparison between

results of actual experiments and results derived from ideal manipulations

or from mental experiments. In fact,

both counterfactuals and mechanisms can work together to secure some

causal knowledge. ... counterfactuals have a key role to play. After all, when

certain assumptions hold, they can establish a causal relation. But without

some knowledge of the mechanism inside the black box, we won’t have full

understanding of the causal relation. Nor can we solve, at least as effectively,

some methodological problems of causal inference.27

Causally relevant information – provided by use of manipulations (exper-

imental strategies) and counterfactuals – is protably embedded within a

mechanical framework and lled in with mechanical details. The appeal of

this approach is precisely that it provides an extrinsic way of picking out

or specifying the intrinsic features of causal relations. Therefore, the new

mechanistic “disentanglement” of causation brings about an interesting

“entanglement” of metaphysical and epistemological aspects of causation.

27. Stathis Psillos, “A Glimpse of the Secret Connexion: Harmonizing Mechanisms with

Counterfactuals,” Perspectives in Science 12 (2004): 317.

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3.4 Stuart Glennan’s approach

The mechanistic account of causation formulated by S. Glennan is

certainly unique in that it offers an overall metaphysical view of the issue.28

In his seminal paper, Glennan explained that a mechanism is a complex

system that produces a behavior via the interaction of a number of parts

according to direct laws.29 In his “Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation,”

he wrote that those interactions are characterized by direct, invariant,

change-relating generalizations.30 Even if he opted for characterizing inter-

actions in terms of Woodward’s invariant change-relating generalizations,

he did not intend to dene causal relations as such in manipulationist

terms. On the contrary, he rmly stated that facts about mechanisms are

of primary importance. Hence, the fundamental aspects of his account are

the things that mechanisms do (the behavior) and the interaction between

parts – understood in terms of generalizations that are showing a high

degree of robustness.

The canonical form for causal statements, according to Glennan, can

be formulated as “event c produced event e in virtue of relevant feature p.”31

Nevertheless, it is causal production that holds fundamental importance

in the case of causal theory. In other words, for Glennan, causal claims

are assertions made in reference to existing mechanisms, and the latter

guarantee that singular causal claims about production are true. In turn,

general claims about causal production are true in virtue of causal connec-

tions between singular events.32 The above formulation clearly shows that

Glennan conceives of causal relations as deriving from mechanisms. The

main point of his singularist conception is that particular mechanisms

link particular causes with particular effects, that is, “singular causal rela-

tions can obtain even if they are not instances of causal regularities or

laws, and what makes causal generalizations true, when they are true,

28. Stuart Glennan, “Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation,” Erkenntnis 44 (1996):

49–71; Stuart Glennan, “Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation,” Philosophy of Science

Suppl. 1 (2002): S342–S353; Stuart Glennan, “Mechanisms, Causes, and the Layered

Model of the World,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (2010): 362–381;

Glennan, New Mechanical Philosophy.

29. Glennan, “Mechanisms,” 52.

30. Glennan, “Rethinking,” S344.

31. Glennan, New Mechanical Philosophy, 175.

32. Stuart Glennan, “Singular and General Causal Relations: A Mechanist Perspective,” in

Causality in the Sciences, eds. Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 789–817.

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is that they correctly describe a pattern of singular instances of causally

related events.”33

The virtue of Glennan’s present account is that it embraces accounts

of causal production (i.e., the activity-based account and the processual

account) as well as accounts of causal relevance (such as Woodward’s),

leaving mechanisms at the heart of his philosophical project. In contrast

to Woodward’s approach, however, and in continuity with Salmon’s main

ideas, Glennan highlights that “the totality of mechanisms – including

their (generally mechanism-dependent) parts, activities, and interac-

tions – constitutes ‘the causal structure of the world.’”34 This mechanical

world has a structure characterized by the nesting of mechanisms within

mechanisms, a relationship which Glennan calls the mechanism-depen-

dence of entities and activities. His theory mainly focuses on compound

mechanisms and all other types of mechanisms which are mechanism-de-

pendent. In addition to these mechanisms, as Glennan has suggested,

there are also assumed to be some fundamental (or basic) mechanisms

that do not depend upon other mechanisms.

Because of Glennan’s distinction between mechanism-dependent

mechanisms and fundamental ones, his view has been criticized on account

of the bottoming-out problem. To assume some set of bottom-out or top-off

entities and activities means to accept some mechanistic components as

relatively fundamental. Since mechanisms occur in nested hierarchies of

levels, typically bottoming out in lowest-level mechanisms, and since the

mechanical theory of causation cannot explain causation in fundamental

physics via the notion of mechanism, there has to be a dichotomy in the

understanding of causation between the case of fundamental physics

(intended at the quantum level) and that of other sciences.35 However,

Glennan has recently questioned his old dichotomic account of mechan-

ically inexplicable generalizations of fundamental physics and mechan-

ically explicable generalizations of higher levels.36 On the one hand, he

now opts for a possible view of the decomposition of causes into mecha-

nisms that continue innitely without the necessity of being grounded in

some basic, lowest-level primitive causal notion. On the other hand, with

Kuhlmann, he refers to the phenomenon of decoherence as one which

33. Glennan, New Mechanical Philosophy, 151–152.

34. Glennan, New Mechanical Philosophy, 148.

35. Glennan, “Mechanisms,” 49–71.

36. Glennan, New Mechanical Philosophy, 184–193.

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can accurately describe the emergence of the macroscopic world from the

quantum domain.37 Both these problems are in need of further explication

that is beyond the scope of this paper.

The link between events and mechanisms in his approach seems to

be unresolved, since the theoretical contents of these concepts overlap to

a signicant degree. On the one hand, an event is simply one or more

entities engaging in an activity or interaction, and events are conceived of

as spatially localized particulars. On the other hand, Glennan characterizes

mechanisms in the same way, that is, as spatially localized particulars. As

a consequence, it is difcult to discern whether the causal mechanisms –

understood as “particulars located at particular places and times”38 – make

possible statements about the production of events or whether events as

spatially localized particulars make possible statements about productive

mechanisms.

This begs the question of how his theory can be characterized on

a general level. So far, two major labels have appeared in the literature.

On the one hand, his stance has been referred to as a monist position

according to which mechanisms are composed of interacting entities,39

a label that goes back to the fundamental dispute between mechanistic

monists and dualists. On the other hand, as Psillos and Ioannidis point out,

Glennan’s minimal account of mechanism suggests instead a substantive

metaphysical view that seems to be at least broadly neo-Aristotelian.40 In

fact, Glennan’s account invokes the primacy of entities and their powers,

thus bearing some similarity to the main assumptions of Aristotelian

metaphysics.

In the case of the NMP, philosophical reection on causation has

given rise to a variety of views on the matter, touching upon a broad range

37. Meinard Kuhlmann and Stuart Glennan, “On the relation between quantum

mechanical and neo-mechanistic ontologies and explanatory strategies,” European

Journal for Philosophy of Science 4, no.3 (2014): 337–359.

38. Glennan, New Mechanical Philosophy, 88.

39. Marie I. Kaiser, “The Components and Boundaries of Mechanisms,” in The Routledge

Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy, eds. Stuart Glennan and Phyllis

Illari (London–New York: Routledge, 2018), 120–124; Gregor Schiemann, “Old and

New Mechanistic Ontologies,” in Mechanistic Explanation in Physics and Beyond.

European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol.11, eds. Brigitte Falkenburg and Gregor

Schiemann (Cham: Springer, 2019), 39–43.

40. Stathis Psillos and Stavros Ioannidis, “Mechanisms, Then and Now: From Metaphysics

to Practice,” in Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond. European Studies in

Philosophy of Science, eds. Brigitte Falkenburg and Gregor Schiemann, vol.11 (Cham:

Springer, 2019), 11–31.

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of largely interrelated issues: from scientic theories and philosophical

frameworks to philosophical theories of explanation and the assessment

of evidence. At this point, we can now draw some conclusions from our

survey of the different causal accounts by pointing to the limitations of

and similarities and differences between these approaches.

4. The New Mechanical Philosophy on the edge

The new mechanistic discussion on causation has liberated the relevant

causal notion from an overly austere view that restricted causation to only

a small class of phenomena, such as collisions, attraction/repulsion, or

energy conservation,41 which was generally typical of the Old Mechanism.

This change is a novel development specic to the NMP, whereby mech-

anisms are understood in terms of entities and activities and elaborated

as part of the actual investigatory practice of the sciences. At the same

time, the focus on methodological recommendations about investigating

the world that comes from the current science brings together the detailed

description of phenomena and the search for their mechanistic expla-

nation. This descriptive and explanatory interdependence is what guides

the exploration of the complexity of reality according to the main tenets of

the NMP. In this section, we will very briey invoke two examples discussed

in the literature that illustrate the limitations of causal (mechanical)

accounts in explaining natural phenomena. Then, we will address the case

of mechanistic boundaries and the problem of Craver’s account of consti-

tutive relevance.

4.1 Explanatory practice in the life sciences

The increasing amount of attention currently being paid to explan-

atory practice in the life sciences entails a stronger focus not only on

isolating a set of phenomena and positing a mechanism that is capable

of producing those phenomena, but also on the role of abstract modeling

in the evaluation of complex phenomena. In other words, a ne-grained

description bottoming out at lower levels or topping off at higher levels and

experimental interventions alone are not sufcient to tell us whether all

components have been lled in, whether there are gaps in the productive

continuity of a particular mechanism, or how a given mechanism can

41. Craver and Tabery, “Mechanisms in Science.”

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generate the phenomenon of interest by virtue of the mechanistic compo-

nents identied.

For instance, if one considers the specic interactions of tyrosine

residues becoming autophosphorylated, one can note that the phosphor-

ylated sites become available for binding to and activating 100different

effector proteins.42 The magnitude of the stochastic process of autophos-

phorylation in this context is impressive. Discussing this case, L. Moss

explains that it results in 500,000 different congurations of the receptor

dimer, each capable of binding to each of those 100 different effector

proteins; this gives the possibility of 2billion different states for each and

every dimerized PDGF receptor complex.43 Merely looking for a strict

compositional and processual analysis of this phenomenon – with its

counterfactual implications – appears to be a blind alley.

We can draw similar conclusions with respect to the application of

causal explanations in contemporary molecular biology. F. Théry points

out the implications of the research on miRNAs (i.e., microRNAs, which

are a class of small non-coding RNAs, 21 to 23nucleotides long, commonly

found in plants and animals).44 Since some of them exceed 50,000mole-

cules per cell, the quantitative approach – commonly employed by scien-

tists in this case – deals with the numerical relations between a multitude

of molecules. The upshot is that, according to recent studies, the impact

of miRNAs is always at the system level: most miRNAs target multiple

genes and act cooperatively to regulate gene expression. This systemic

perspective of miRNA regulation has important implications for the

explanatory discourse.

42. Tyrosine is one of the 20standard amino acids that are used by cells to synthesize proteins.

Some of the tyrosine residues can be tagged with a phosphate group (phosphorylated)

by protein kinases. The phosphorylation process consists in the attachment of a

phosphoryl group and, together with its counterpart (dephosphorylation), is crucial for

many cellular processes in biology. Generally, tyrosine phosphorylation is considered

to be one of the main steps in signal transduction and regulation of enzymatic activity

(Ardito Fatima, Michele Giuliani, Donatella Perrone, Giuseppe Troiano, and Lorenzo

Lo Muzio, “The crucial role of protein phosphorylation in cell signaling and its use

as targeted therapy (Review),” International Journal of Molecular Medicine 40, no. 2

(2017): 271–280).

43. Lenny Moss, “Is the Philosophy of Mechanism Philosophy Enough?” Studies in History

and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 169.

44. Frédérique Théry, “Explaining in Contemporary Molecular Biology: Beyond

Mechanisms,” in Explanation in Biology: An Enquiry into the Diversity of Explanatory

Patterns in the Life Sciences, eds. Pierre-Alain Braillard and Christophe Malaterre

(Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 113–133.

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The fragmentation of living systems into particular mechanisms

certainly has a heuristic motivation. However, for instance in the case of

stochastic processes (such as specic interactions of tyrosine residues)

or molecular interactions (as in the case of miRNA), mechanisms do not

provide a good explanation of cellular functions at the molecular level. It

is then the systems approach in the life sciences that seems to be more

successful in improving our understanding of complex processes. This

approach focuses on integrating evidence across functional and struc-

tural differentially scaled subsystems, conceptualizing complex multilevel

systems, and suggesting the mechanisms and non-linear relations under-

lying the observed phenomena.45 The systems approach, often involving

large-scale mathematical and computational modeling, is looking for

principles that govern the organization of phenomena rather than for

individuating entities and properties responsible for the behavior under

scrutiny. Because of this theoretical shift in the life sciences, some authors

argue that the mechanism-talk in biology draws metaphorically on the

knowledge of emblematic machines, which is heuristically transposed

onto the descriptions of molecular mechanisms.46

4.2 Boundaries of mechanisms and constitutive relevance

In the mechanistic literature, the matter of the boundaries of mecha-

nisms – that is the boundaries between the constituting entities and activ-

ities – poses a real challenge. The most difcult question is probably that

of the criteria to be used for individuating the boundaries of entities, activ-

ities, and mechanisms themselves.47 In fact, one may identify different

principles that guide the carving of the components of mechanisms, such

as the natural boundaries of biological objects (e.g., the cell membrane,

the skin, or the mountain range that encloses a specic ecosystem), or the

strength of interactions (e.g., in nearly decomposable systems, interac-

tions among the parts of an object are generally stronger than interactions

45. Felix Tretter, Olaf Wolkenhauer, Michael Meyer-Hermann, Johannes W. Dietrich, Sara

Green, James A. Marcum, and Wolfram Weckwerth, “The Quest for System-Theoretical

Medicine in the COVID-19 Era,” Frontiers in Medicine 8 (2021): n.pag.

46. Moss, “Philosophy of Mechanism,” 164–172; Daniel J. Nicholson, “The Concept of

Mechanism in Biology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical

Sciences 43 (2012): 152–163; Daniel J. Nicholson, “The Return of the Organism as a

Fundamental Explanatory Concept in Biology,” Philosophy Compass 9, no.5 (2014):

347–359.

47. Kaiser, “Components and Boundaries,” 116–130.

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between those parts and the object’s environment).48 In addition, Craver’s

account of constitutive relevance has been considered a good way as it

concerns how the activities of parts make a difference to the activities of

wholes. On the one hand, this account tries to deal with the problem of

causal relevance (i.e., how causes make a difference to their effect) in the

context of mechanistic organization; on the other hand, it tries to offer

an essential method for identifying the working constituents of a mecha-

nism.49

Whether Craver’s account is successful in solving these problems has

been the subject of much ongoing discussion. Briey put, the core problem

of Craver’s account of constitutive relevance derives from the fact that its

conceptual background is based on the criteria of mutual manipulability

and ideal intervention. The former states that a component is constitutive

of a mechanism if one can change the explanandum phenomenon by inter-

vening to change a component of the mechanism, and vice versa. It is

then clear that this criterion implies some sort of symmetrical inter-level

relations (i.e., relations between components and mechanisms). If that is

the case, are these relations to be regarded as causal or not? Should this

symmetry thesis be understood as a metaphysical explication of inter-level

causal relations or rather as an epistemological criterion for identifying

inter-level relations within mechanisms? The epistemological criterion

implies that an intervention either on a phenomenon or on a component

of a mechanism has to be ideal in the sense of affecting directly and only

the targeted element. However, considering the complexity of natural

phenomena, it does not seem that such interventions are easily realizable

in the scientic practice.50

48. Herbert A. Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity,” Proceedings of the American

Philosophical Society 106 (1962): 467–482; Lindley Darden, “Thinking Again about

Biological Mechanisms,” Philosophy of Science 75 (2008): 958–969; Lindley Darden,

“Mechanisms Versus Causes in Biology and Medicine,” in Mechanisms and Causality

in Biology and Economics, eds. Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen, and Roberta

Millstein (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 19–34; William C. Wimsatt, “Complexity and

Organization,” Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association (1972): 67–86.

49. Craver, Explaining the Brain.

50. Bert Leuridan, “Can Mechanisms Really Replace Laws of Nature?” Philosophy of

Science 77 (2010): 317–340; Felipe Romero, “Why there isn’t inter-level causation in

mechanisms,” Synthese 192 (2015): 3731–3755; Totte Harinen, “Mutual manipulability

and causal inbetweenness,” Synthese 195 (2018): 35–54; Michael Baumgartner and

Alexander Gebharter, “Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-

Handedness,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2016): 731–756.

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Even if mechanistic explanation has some difculties in embracing

the current explanatory shift in the biological sciences or does not have

satisfactory solutions to the problems of boundaries or constitutive rele-

vance, we do not think that the mechanistic project per se is undermined.

At this point, we would like to interpret the above-mentioned limits in the

light of the metaphysical commitments that emerge from the mechanistic

project.

5. Different metaphysical commitments

The very point of the mechanistic approach is to decompose a system

into parts, then specify the properties of and causal relationships between

those parts. All this is done for the sake of understanding the multilevel

organization of the system, that is, how the spatial and temporal orga-

nization of the parts constitutes the mechanisms responsible for a given

phenomenon. The mechanistic approach is a multilevel approach that

accounts for higher-level phenomena in terms of lower-level entities and

activities. It is not surprising, then, that at this point, the NMP project

remains particularly amenable to various metaphysical commitments. If

we formulate the issue of multiple levels in metaphysical terms, then at

one end of the spectrum, there could be the position that a mechanism is

“nothing but” its organized parts. At the other end of the spectrum, there

could be a view that denies the primacy of the “nothingbutness” approach,

advocating rather for the primacy of the overall mechanistic behavior or

complex mechanistic structures in which the parts are not mere additions

of some basic components. The distinction between mechanistic organi-

zation and aggregation is not the sole metaphysical commitment. There

are many others, such as, for example, the ontic status of the regularity of

certain phenomena, patterns of mechanistic organization, properties of

causal and constitutive relations, or metaphysical grounding of causal rela-

tions. In what follows, we will show that the variety of causal approaches

within the NMP leads to different metaphysical commitments, such as the

complexity of reality or the dissatisfaction with the Humean regularity

view of causation.

5.1 The complex reality

The use of quantitative methods aimed at grasping the interrelat-

edness of causal processes, as previously mentioned, evidences some-

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thing of reality in itself. If the enormous amount of data coming from

our study of the complex reality is not sufcient to determine our theo-

retical content, this not only points to the limitations of our epistemic

tools, but also reveals our general limitations in dealing with reality. One

might argue that the issue of causal complexity has often been underem-

phasized in the philosophy of science. Therefore, the debate over different

causal accounts and explanatory constraints within the NMP can be

regarded as a quest for employing the “most efcient tools” in order to

deal with the complexity of reality. In this context, mechanists’ typical way

of emphasizing the hierarchical organization of mechanisms comes as

no surprise. The hierarchical structure of biological systems (with cells

organized into tissues, tissues into organs, and organs into systems) or

physical ones (with elementary particles, atoms, molecules, macromole-

cules, and so on) is a fact that indicates the need for a careful analysis of

the enormous complexity of the phenomena. In short, adopting a pluralist

stance on causation seems to reect the complicated, multifaceted nature

of phenomena in the world and our way of knowing them.51

5.2 Hume’s objection disarmed?

The four approaches discussed in Section 3, as Matthews and

Tabery point out, share a dissatisfaction with the Humean regularity view

of causation, but each of them responds to Hume in a different way.52

Salmon and Glennan attempted to identify the necessary connection

between cause and effect as sought by Hume. Salmon opted for causal

processes, and Glennan for mechanisms, arguing that both processes

and mechanisms provide the necessary connections between causes and

effects. Anscombe and Woodward, however, dismissed Hume’s challenge.

The former replaced the general account of causation with the singularist

view, and the latter focused on the difference-making characterization of

causation. In a similar vein, Machamer, Darden, and Craver passed over

Hume’s objections by focusing on the activities of mechanistic constituents

in empirical research. The fact that we are invoking Hume in our context is

not a mere historical incipit. The new mechanistic discussion on causality

shows that, even if one considers the difculty in providing satisfactory

causal accounts and nding the causally relevant factors in scientic

51. Angela Potochnik, Idealization and the Aims of Science (Chicago–London: The

University of Chicago Press, 2017), 35.

52. Matthews and Tabery, “Mechanisms,” 131–143.

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practice, it is the alignment of philosophy and science that helps unravel

“the secret connexion between causes and effects.” Although science does

not need an all-encompassing account of causality in order to start its

research, it nevertheless does not follow that the notion of causation is

incoherent or too vague and should be eliminated from philosophy and

science. On the contrary, the new mechanistic debate shows that science

continuously forces us to reformulate our understanding of causation,

and if it is difcult in some advanced sciences to grasp the causality in

the sense of its discovery and justication, this only shows that an easy

optimism about rapid resolution of complex issues is unfounded.

5.3 The ontological zoo: entities, activities, events, processes

The different causal approaches discussed above can lead to the

assumption of different metaphysical constituents.53 Activity-based

approaches are rather focused on an ontic mechanism in which entities

and activities are interdependent. In fact, this is the central suggestion of

Machamer, Darden and, Craver’s denition of mechanism. Causation is

a result of entities carrying out their activities, and the conceptual pair

of activity–entity (whereby an activity produces changes in an entity)

points to the complex organization and dynamic character of the mecha-

nistic system, spatiotemporally located in its environment. In the case of

Glennan’s approach, the emphasis is on the link between events, where this

link is a productive process that depends on the mechanism as a spatio-

temporally continuous system. Thus, both approaches not only agree with

the worldview where causation is productive, but also stand in contrast

to general formulations of activities in terms of causal laws. In fact, these

approaches focus on mechanisms individuated via the decomposition and

localization of constituents in terms of recurring phenomena.

Moreover, both accounts – the activity-based account and Glennan’s

account – appear to be highly inuenced by the processual approach.

Certainly, what counts as a process depends on the particular science and

on the explanandum that we want to study. Nevertheless, the mechanistic

literature is lled with various candidates for being a causal process, such

as the transference of energy, the interaction of different forces, the conser-

vation of a physical quantity (e.g., a charge), etc. Since the processual

53. Holly Andersen, “A Field Guide to Mechanisms: Part I,” Philosophy Compass 9 (2014):

274–283; Holly Andersen, “A Field Guide to Mechanisms: Part II,” Philosophy Compass

9 (2014): 284–297.

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approach focuses on physical and spatiotemporally continuous conditions

of causal processes, the mechanistic approach seems to be particularly

prone to microphysicalism about causation.54 At the same time, causal

processes, as Salmon explicated, transmit their own structure and are

capable of propagating a causal inuence from one space-time locale to

another. The latter view is what counterbalances the microphysicalism in

the case of the NMP. In fact, new mechanists tend to not only speak about

spatiotemporal conditions for interaction between certain activities, but

also apply more systemic thinking in causal explanations, focusing on the

functions of elements, complex interactions, the properties of the whole

into which parts are organized, and the given environmental context. In

summary, describing mechanisms in dual terms – that is in terms of activ-

ities and entities – has given rise to thinking of mechanisms as systems55 or

structures56 with particular causal capacities under particular conditions.

5.4 The mechanism–causation link

Mechanisms and causation are close relatives, since mechanisms are

said to enable the identication of causal relations. The fundamental issue

for mechanists is what mechanisms do, and this act of “doing” is largely

regarded as causally productive. Nevertheless, in scientic practice, the

notion of mechanism usually refers to causal capacities of organized

systems or structures. The notion of structure itself is highly compatible

with the mechanistic idea of organization, the latter being the expla-

nandum of constitutive explanations, not of causal ones. It is the problem

of constitutive relevance that makes Woodward’s approach so popular

within the NMP. Although Woodward’s account is often considered a

non-metaphysical project, his interventionist account might be seen as

a metaphysical endeavor focused on the mechanistic organization. M.

Strevens rightly points out that the latter is an account according to which

causation is mind-independent (i.e., it is an inquiry into the nature of

causation that does not depend on how we get to know about this relation),

and is generally considered a semantic project.57 As Strevens notes, “if

54. Philip Pettit, “A Denition of Physicalism,” Analysis 53, no.4 (1993): 213–223.

55. Glennan, “Rethinking,” S342–S353.

56. William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen, “Explanation: a mechanist alternative,”

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy

of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36, no.2 (2005): 421–441.

57. Michael Strevens, “Comments on Woodward, Making Things Happen,” Philosophy and

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Revista Portuguesa de Filosoa, Vol. 77, No. 4 (2021): -70

Woodward’s causal semantics is a truth-conditional semantics, he is inev-

itably, unavoidably, ineluctably committed to producing an account of the

truthmakers for causal talk, a metaphysics of causal facts, whatever his

protestations.”58

Different causal approaches within the NMP lead to different meta-

physical commitments. Such a variety of concepts stems, on the one hand,

from the complexity of the phenomena themselves (i.e., the multiple

levels of organization or multiple factors within the same level), and on

the other hand, from the multifaceted character of causal explanations.

It has to be emphasized that from a metaphysical point of view, the orga-

nization of mechanisms is the most elusive matter. The organization of

mechanistic parts is crucial for the constitution of mechanisms which

are not mere aggregates of their own parts. However, mechanistic organi-

zation is highly complex. In other words, the organization of parts consti-

tutes a mechanism and its causal capacity, but it is not clear how that

mechanism’s causal capacity constitutes its parts and their organization.

The organization of mechanisms is not a mere covariance or correlation

between properties of constituents and of the whole mechanism, but

rather a mysterious synchronization and ne tuning of the most sensitive

elements embedded in the overall organization.

6. Interactive causal pluralism

Before assessing the type of pluralism that exists within the NMP,

we would like to refer to a very helpful list of the different versions of

pluralism available in the current philosophical debate as proposed by

J. Van Bouwel.59 If these versions are to be placed on a continuum going

from monism to anything goes pluralism, then – according to Van Bouwel’s

proposal – we have monism, moderate/temporary pluralism, integrative

pluralism, interactive pluralism, isolationist pluralism, and anything

goes pluralism. The moderate, integrative, isolationist, and anything goes

versions of pluralism are discussed by S. Mitchell,60 while the interactive

Phenomenological Research 77, no.1 (2008): 171–192.

58. Strevens, “Comments on Woodward,” 184.

59. Jeroen Van Bouwel, “Pluralists About Pluralism? Different Versions of Explanatory

Pluralism in Psychiatry,” in New Directions in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Maria C.

Galavotti et al. (Cham–Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 105–119.

60. Sandra D. Mitchell, “Integrative Pluralism,” Biology and Philosophy 17 (2002): 55–70.

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version is proposed by Van Bouwel. Monism – viewed as explanatory

reductionism – generally equates science with a single language, one

true scientic method, one a priori privileged level of explanation, and

one correct standard for all explanations. Moderate/temporary pluralism

promotes a temporary plurality of competing theories as a step towards

achieving the unity of science in the long run. This form of pluralism

acknowledges the monist goal and the resolvable character of plurality.

Integrative pluralism, in turn, takes into account highly specialized disci-

plinary research on the one hand and the need for integrating the ndings

concerning a given phenomenon on the other. And as regards interactive

pluralism,

on the one hand, it claims that satisfactory explanations can also be obtained

without integrating of multiple levels, so there is no integration imperative,

and ... on the other hand, it does not discourage interaction as, in some

instances, interaction and integration do lead to better explanations.61

Isolationist pluralism presupposes some sort of explanatory closure

within each level of analysis and a narrowness in scope of scientic inves-

tigation that excludes interaction between scientic disciplines. And

nally, anything goes pluralism holds all the possibly inconsistent theories

that emerge from the scientic endeavor to be equally acceptable. These

versions of pluralism offer different answers to the question of whether

the plurality needs to be resolved and how it should be understood.

Does then mechanistic philosophy have any particular contribution in

endorsing the pluralism of causal approaches?62 Referring to the above list

of various pluralisms, one may note that the mechanists’ view on causality

is at odds with monism (since mechanists are not in favor of one all-en-

compassing view on causation), moderate/temporary pluralism (since

mechanists do not promote a temporary plurality of competing causal

theories as a means of achieving the unity of science in the long run),

isolationist pluralism (since mechanists neither exclude the interaction

between scientic disciplines nor presuppose some sort of explanatory

closure within each level of causal analysis), and anything goes pluralism

61. Van Bouwel, “Pluralists,” 109.

62. Hasok Chang, “Is pluralism compatible with scientic realism?” in The Routledge

Handbook of Scientic Realism, ed. Juha Saatsi (London–New York: Routledge, 2018),

176–186; Michał Oleksowicz and Piotr Roszak, “Plurality as the epistemic good.

Theological explanation in science-religion debate,” Journal for the Study of Religions

and Ideologies 20, no.58 (Spring 2021): 81–95.

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(since mechanists do not hold all the possibly inconsistent causal theories

that emerge from the scientic endeavor to be equally acceptable). Now,

we will focus on a more interesting case of integrative pluralism and then

discuss interactive pluralism in the context of the mechanistic view on

causation.

In the case of mechanistic causal pluralism, we believe that the prin-

cipal limitation of the integrative stance is that it does not consider the

trade-off between the accuracy, adequacy and efciency of explanations

in labelling what is “satisfactory.” Accuracy concerns the relationship with

reality (i.e., precise description), adequacy refers to what the explainer

expects from the explanation that addresses a certain interest, and ef-

ciency indicates the amount of work needed to provide an explanation.

The point is therefore that “integrative explanations might be some-

times far too cumbersome, less efcient, and less adequate than possible

alternative explanations.”63 Always focusing on integration, irrespective

of precise explanatory aims in a given context, would on the one hand

unnecessarily complicate matters, and on the other, subject the plurality

to the imperative of integration. To some degree, integrative pluralism

correctly describes the character of causal plurality as envisaged by the

mechanistic philosophy. However, the mechanistic debate over causal

explanation reveals that what makes pluralism so useful and efcacious

is that it might help rene the respective approaches by articulating their

strengths and limitations due to the interaction and engagement. This

interactive pluralism can be further articulated in the case of mechanistic

causal pluralism.

If one looks at the mechanistic talk about causation and causal expla-

nations, it becomes clear that mechanists are strongly interested in tracing

causal relations in order to form certain explanations and generalizations

of phenomena. Reecting on the mechanistic literature, one can note that

it not only takes a unique view of causation, but also combines different

concepts that describe what kind of relation causation is. For instance, F.

Russo and J. Williamson argue in their seminal paper on causality in the

health sciences that in this context, causal claims are made on the basis of

evidence of both physical mechanisms and probabilistic dependencies.64

The rst sort of evidence may involve chemical reactions, electric signals,

63. Van Bouwel, “Pluralists,” 110.

64. Federica Russo and Jon Williamson, “Interpreting Causality in the Health Sciences,”

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21, no.2 (2007): 157–170.

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Revista Portuguesa de Filosoa, Vol. 77, No. 4 (2021): -70

alterations at the cellular level, etc. The existence of a mechanism explains

both the dependencies and the stability of causal relations. The proba-

bilistic evidence mainly consists of dependencies observed in a range of

similar studies and does not per se prove causation; nevertheless, strong

correlations can be good evidence for the presence of causal relations.

Russo and Williamson consider both causal monism and causal pluralism

as highly problematic. The former is not able to account for the need to

have different types of evidence – for example, mechanistic and proba-

bilistic – with respect to a single causal claim. The latter faces a similar

problem “plus the difculty of explaining why we seem to have one concept

of cause when in fact we have several, or why we seem to be talking about

one causal relation when in fact there are several.”65 Although the authors

opt for the epistemic theory of causal relations in terms of rational beliefs,

we think that a variety of indicators of causality (including dependencies,

mechanisms, concepts, models, etc.) can be properly interpreted in the

light of interactive causal pluralism.

On the one hand, interactive pluralism claims that satisfactory expla-

nations can also be obtained without regard to the integration imper-

ative, and on the other, it does not disregard the fact that interaction and

integration may lead to better explanations. What is then the evidence in

favor of such mechanistic interactive causal pluralism? We propose the

following arguments:

1. Different mechanistic approaches to causation compete in parsing the causal

space, therefore it remains an open question which of the accounts should

be advocated and whether different accounts can or cannot be integrated in

order to obtain the causal history of an explanandum.

2. Different approaches start on an equal footing, since the interaction between

approaches is what responds to challenges and aims (explanatory interests)

posited by the knower.

3. The shift in mechanistic literature towards systemic thinking is evidence

that explanation-seeking questions can be channels of interaction between

competing explanatory projects.

4. The focus on various aspects of causality does not exclude the role of meta-

physical analysis, but reects both the complex character of causal systems

in the world and our explanatory interests.

65. Russo and Williamson, “Interpreting Causality,” 167.

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Michał Oleksowicz

Revista Portuguesa de Filosoa, Vol. 77, No. 4 (2021): -70

5. The continuous revision of our causal explanations via the interaction and

engagement of different theoretical frameworks is what guarantees a good t

of such explanations to the explanandum.

6. The interaction of different causal accounts does not have to do with some

provisional feature of our construction of causal knowledge that is to be

overcome by capturing a deep, single theory of causation.

Interactive mechanistic causal pluralism acknowledges more than just a

range of different possible epistemic tools and ontic commitments, as any

pluralism does. What is at stake is the fact that the pluralism discussed

above is an explicit endorsement of the multiplicity of epistemological and

metaphysical approaches to causation that offers “an added value, and

should be strongly preferred over monistic attempts to reduce, neglect,

or overcome plurality.”66 Interactive pluralism preserves the richness of

plurality, since it does not necessarily commit us to the progressively

pursued integration towards some sort of most comprehensive under-

standing, winning super-explanation, or single correct metaphysical

theory of causation. Such interactive pluralism is mainly motivated by

the fact that scientic theories dealing with complex phenomena are

underdetermined by the available data. Thus, it is our view that mech-

anistic pluralism mainly aims at deciphering the complexity of natural

phenomena.

Conclusions

Mechanists tend to characterize causation as a productive, intrinsic,

singular, or general relation. In the case of the general causal relation, it

seems that mechanists are divided into those who interpret it in a meta-

physical manner (meaning that all complex mechanism-systems must rely

on stable, metaphysical regularities) and those who do so in an epistemo-

logical manner (where the role of generalizations is epistemic rather than

explanatory). Moreover, some mechanists take causation to be further

explicated by evoking stable regularities (Leuridan67), relations of counter-

factual dependence (Craver), probabilistic relations (Russo, Williamson),

66. Raffaella Campaner, “Commentary: Plurality and Pluralisms for the Social Sciences,”

in Contemporary Philosophy and Social Sciences. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, eds. M.

Nagatsu and A. Ruzzene (London–New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 30.

67. Leuridan, “Mechanisms,” 317–340.

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the transference of some property (Salmon), or the relation between

events on the ground of a mechanism (Glennan). However, these mecha-

nistic distinctions do not primarily focus on an all-encompassing view of

what formal properties the causal relation has or what the causal relata

are. Although mechanists are very careful in keeping track of the direction

of causal inuence, sometimes they concentrate on unidirectional causal

relationships, and in other cases, they seek proper formal tools in order

to grasp the bidirectional (as in the cases of feedback or different cycles)

causal relations. In addition, some of them consider constitutive depen-

dency relationships as bidirectional (in terms of mutual manipulability),

while others interpret them as non-causal. A similar proliferation of

perspectives can be seen in the case of causal relata, which are assumed

to be, for example, events, properties, activities, interactions, or entities.

If, according to mechanists, there is generally no single fact of the

matter as to what causation is, does the latter remain a “patchwork”

notion? Denitely not. Although their analysis of causation is not aimed

at providing a unied and complete philosophical story that covers every

aspect of the nature of causation, in the mechanistic case, we witness an

interactive causal pluralism – namely, the presence of competing causal

accounts that actually address the same object and the same explan-

atory question. These competing accounts are adopted depending on

the specic kind of phenomenon, the features of the phenomenon and

levels of its organization, background knowledge, and the the researcher’s

explanatory aims. Explanation-seeking questions such as what-if-things-

had-been-different questions (concerning knowledge of the conditions of

the explanandum), how-does-that-work questions (concerning the depth

of one’s understanding of a hierarchy of mechanisms), or questions on the

role that mechanistic parts play in higher-level mechanisms (concerning

knowledge of higher-level causal patterns) require a combination and

cooperation of various models and causal accounts in order to address

the explanatory interests in a case.68 Although no unique account is

commonly adopted by mechanists, it does not entail that “anything goes”

in the case of causal claims, or that science does not search for causes (as

was Hume’s objection), or nally that the principle of causation is devoid

of content. Mechanists are convinced that we can and do know a lot about

68. Ronald N. Giere, “How Models Are Used to Represent Reality,” Philosophy of Science 5

(2004): 742–52; Ronald N. Giere, “An agent-based conception of models and scientic

representation,” Synthese 172 (2010): 269–281; Peter Godfrey-Smith, “The strategy of

model-based science,” Biology and Philosophy 5 (2006): 725–740.

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Michał Oleksowicz

Revista Portuguesa de Filosoa, Vol. 77, No. 4 (2021): -70

causation in the world and that we acquire valuable and valid knowledge

of causation in a piecemeal way.

All the approaches to causation proposed by mechanists have certain

limitations: they are not applicable to all domains of knowledge or to any

explanatory context, nor are they free of counterexamples. The wide range

of different concepts on causation adopted by mechanists in dealing with

the explananda not only depends on the mind-independent complexity

of the world, but also – at the same time – relies deeply on contextual

and pragmatic factors of mechanistic explanation. Even if there are some

contentious issues as regards favoring one approach over others in specic

cases, it does not lead to any decisive rejection of one account in favor of

another. On the contrary, all of them work together in opening the black

box of complex causal systems in the world.

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Patterns of explanation in biology have long been recognized as different from those deployed in other scientific disciplines, especially physics. Celebrating the diversity of explanatory models found in biology, this volume details their varying types as well as their relationships to one another. It covers the key current debates in the philosophy of biology over the nature of explanation, and its apparent diversity that stems from a variety of historical, causal, mechanistic, or mathmatical explanatory practices. Offering a wealth of fresh analyses on the nature of explanation in contemporary biology chapters examine aspects ranging from the role of mathematics in explaining cell development to the complexities thrown up by evolutionary-developmental biology, where explanation is altered by multidisciplinarity itself. They cover major domains such as ecology and systems biology, as well as contemporary trends, such as the mechanistic explanations spawned by progress in molecular biology. With contributions from researchers of many different nationalities, the book provides a many-angled perspective on a revealing feature of the discipline of biology.

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