A Defence of Manipulationist Noncausal Explanation: The Case for Intervention Liberalism

Recent years have seen growing interest in modifying interventionist accounts of causal explanation in order to characterise noncausal explanation. However, one surprising element of such accounts is that they have typically jettisoned the core feature of interventionism: interventions. Indeed, the prevailing opinion within the philosophy of science literature suggests that interventions exclusively demarcate causal relationships. This position is so prevalent that, until now, no one has even thought to name it. We call it “intervention puritanism”. In this paper, we mount the first sustained defence of the idea that there are distinctively noncausal explanations which can be characterized in terms of possible interventions; and thus, argue that I-puritanism is false. We call the resultant position “intervention liberalism” (I-liberalism, for short). While many have followed Woodward (Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003) in committing to I-pluralism, we trace support for I-liberalism back to the work of Kim (in: Kim (ed) Supervenience and mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974/1993). Furthermore, we analyse two recent sources of scepticism regarding I-liberalism: debate surrounding mechanistic constitution; and attempts to provide a monistic account of explanation. We show that neither literature provides compelling reasons for adopting I-puritanism. Finally, we present a novel taxonomy of available positions upon the role of possible interventions in explanation: weak causal imperialism; strong causal imperialism; monist intervention puritanism; pluralist intervention puritanism; monist intervention liberalism; and finally, the specific position defended in this paper, pluralist intervention liberalism.

Mechanisms

This chapter introduces the account of minimal mechanism, according to which a mechanism consists of a set of parts or entities whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for some phenomenon. The concepts appealed to in this account—phenomena, entities, activities, organization—are elaborated, and the relation of minimal mechanism to other accounts is explored. Mechanisms are shown to be compounds that are organized in two dimensions, the horizontal dimension of causal dependence and a vertical or part-whole dimension called mechanistic constitution. I argue that almost all natural and social phenomena depend upon mechanisms so characterized, and that this fact leads to a new mechanical ontology, which alters the way we should think about traditional metaphysical categories like substances, processes, properties, dispositions, causes, and laws of nature.