Talk: Max Kistler (Paris)

Title:

Integrating Constitution into Causal Models

Abstract:

According to Craver (2007), constitutive relevance can be discovered by mutual manipulability, based on interventions. However, the requirements on interventions make mutual manipulability of mechanisms and their constituents impossible. Both Baumgartner and Casini’s (2017) “no-decoupling” account and Craver, Glennan, and Povich’s (2021) analysis of constitutive relevance as “causal betweenness” take into account the fact that one cannot analyze constitution, which is a non-causal dependence relation, as difference-making of the same sort as causation. Both provide decisive new insights on constitution but none of them provides a complete analysis of the scientific construction of models of mechanisms with constituents at different layers. It is possible to construct models of multi-level mechanisms representing constitution (a non-causal relation) although the relevant experiments directly provide only information on causal relations, because causal information can bear on variables at different levels. A multi-level model is built in two steps. 1) first, partial purely causal models are built for each hypothetical constituent variable F_i, on the basis of top-down and bottom-up experiments that modify or measure F_i in a level-specific way, 2) second, those partial models are merged in a comprehensive model containing both causal and constitution relations, on the basis of information about the level of each variable and spatio-temporal constraints.