Plato’s Forms as powers

This chapter introduces Plato’s fundamental entities, the Forms. It focuses on his view that the Forms are causal powers, and his innovative stance that the Forms are transcendent entities; it argues that Plato’s Forms are transcendent powers. This raises the (difficult) question of what kind of causal efficacy transcendent entities can have on things in the physical world. By showing that Plato’s Forms are causal powers having constitutional causal efficacy, as difference-makers, like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, the chapter begins to build the case for what I call Plato’s Anaxagoreanism. If the Forms operate like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, by constitutional causal efficacy, except that they are transcendent, how can features of objects in the physical world be constitutionally derived from features of transcendent entities, the Forms? The chapter argues that Plato thinks of the causal efficacy of the Forms on the model of the normativity of mathematics and geometry over the sensible world.

Black-Boxing 101

This chapter breaks down the black-boxing process into three constitutive steps. First, in the framing stage, the explanandum is sharpened by placing the object of explanation in the appropriate context. This is typically accomplished by constructing a frame, a placeholder that stands in for patterns of behavior in need of explanation. Second, the difference-making stage provides a causal explanation of the framed explanandum. This involves identifying the relevant difference-makers, placeholders that stand in for the mechanisms producing these patterns. The final representation stage determines which mechanistic components and activities should be explicitly represented, and which can be idealized or abstracted away. The outcome of this process is a model of the explanandum, a depiction of the relevant portion of the world. This analysis provides the general definition the reader has been looking for. A black box is a placeholder—frame or difference-maker—in a causal explanation represented in a model.

Explanation in the science of consciousness: From the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) to the difference makers of consciousness (DMCs)

At present, the science of consciousness is structured around the search for the neural correlates of consciousness (the NCCs). One of the alleged advantages of the NCCs framework is its metaphysical neutrality—the fact that it begs no contested questions with respect to debates about the fundamental nature of consciousness. Here, we argue that even if the NCC framework is metaphysically neutral, it is structurally committed, for it presupposes a certain model—what we call the Lite-Brite model—of consciousness. This, we argue, represents a serious liability for the NCC framework for the plausibility of the Lite-Brite model is very much an open question, and the science of consciousness would be better served by a framework that does not presuppose it. Drawing on interventionist ideas in the philosophy of science, we suggest that the Difference-Maker framework can provide just such an alternative. Instead of searching for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), we ought to be searching for the difference makers of consciousness (DMCs). We detail how a shift to searching DMCs will change both the practice of consciousness science and the interpretation of existing results.

The Non-Transitivity of Causation

There are clear cases in which causation is not transitive and this drops out of the analysis developed in which causation involves a certain kind of chance-raising involved after subtracting competitor processes. Attempts to explain away these cases to secure the transitivity of causation are a mistake. Alternative ways of capturing the non-transitivity of causation involve fixing the competitor processes in order to detect chance-raising dependencies between the target cause and effect. This alternative manoeuvre engenders problems. The non-transitivity of causation is better understood in the terms of my analysis rather than by appealing to the idea that causes are difference-makers (in a specified sense) or, in the kind of cases considered, switchers by interaction with a process.