Contrastive Casual Claims: A Case Study

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2016

Contrastive and deviant/default accounts of causation are becoming increasingly common. However, discussions of these accounts have neglected important questions, including how the context determines the contrasts (or defaults), and what shared knowledge is necessary for this to be possible. I address these questions, using organic chemistry as a case study. Focusing on one example-nucleophilic substitution-I show that the kinds of causal claims that can be made about an organic reaction depend on how the reaction is modelled, and argue that paying attention to the various ways that reactions are modelled has important implications for our understanding of causation. 1 Introduction 2 General Contrastive Causal Claims in Organic Chemistry 3 Deviant Causal Claims in Organic Chemistry 4 Nucleophilic Substitution Reactions 5 The Causal Modelling Tradition 5.1 The type/token distinction 6 Competing Reactions 6.1 Type-and token-causal claims, variables, and values of variables 7 Disambiguation of 'Reaction' 8 Reaction Kinds 9 Specific Reactions 9.1 Specific reactions and token-causal claims 9.2 Specific reactions and type-causal claims 10 Implications 10.1 Kinds of causal claim 10.2 Contrastive and deviant causal claims 10.3 Model relativity

Synthese, 2016

I apply James Woodward's interventionist theory of causation to organic chemistry, modelling three different ways that chemists are able to manipulate the reaction conditions in order to control the outcome of a reaction. These consist in manipulations to the reaction kinetics, thermodynamics, and whether the kinetics or thermodynamics predominates. It is possible to construct interventionist causal models of all of these kinds of manipulation, and therefore to account for them using Woodward's theory. However, I show that there is an alternate, more illuminating way of thinking about the third kind of reaction control, according to which chemists are thought of as manipulating which causal system is instantiated. I show that our ability to manipulate which system is instantiated is an important part of our ability to control the world, as is therefore especially relevant to interventionism. Thus, considering examples from organic chemistry leads to the identification of an important extension to Woodward's theory. Finally, this investigation into reaction control in organic chemistry also has a more general implication: it suggests that interventionism results in a version of pragmatism about causation.

Causal relations among components and activities are intentionally misrepresented in mechanistic explanations found routinely across the life sciences. Since several mechanists explicitly advocate accurately representing factors that make a di erence to the outcome, these idealizations conflict with the stated rationale for mechanistic explanation. We argue that these idealizations signal an overlooked feature of reasoning in molecular and cell biology -- mechanistic explanations do not occur in isolation -- and suggest that explanatory practices within the mechanistic tradition share commonalities with model-based approaches prevalent in population biology.

This paper tracks the commitments of mechanistic explanations focusing on the relation between activities at different levels. It is pointed out that the mechanistic approach is inherently committed to identifying causal connections at higher levels with causal connections at lower levels. For the mechanistic approach to succeed a mechanism as a whole must do the very same thing what its parts organised in a particular way do. The mechanistic approach must also utilise bridge principles connecting different causal terms of different theoretical vocabularies in order to make the identities of causal connections transparent. These general commitments get confronted with two claims made by certain proponents of the mechanistic approach: William Bechtel often argues that within the mechanistic framework it is possible to balance between reducing higher levels and maintaining their autonomy at the same time, whereas, in a recent paper, Craver and Bechtel argue that the mechanistic approach is able to make downward causation intelligible. The paper concludes that the mechanistic approach imbued with identity statements is no better candidate for anchoring higher levels to lower ones while maintaining their autonomy at the same time than standard reductive accounts are, and that what mechanistic explanations are able to do at best is showing that downward causation does not exist.

Interface Focus, 2011

This article examines two influential authors who have addressed the interface between the fields of chemistry and physics and have reached opposite conclusions about whether or not emergence and downward causation represent genuine phenomena. While McLaughlin concludes that emergence is impossible in the light of quantum mechanics, Hendry regards issues connected with the status of molecular structure as supporting emergence. The present author suggests that one should not be persuaded by either of these arguments and pleads for a form of agnosticism over the reality of emergence and downward causation until further studies might be carried out.

This article examines two influential authors who have addressed the interface between the fields of chemistry and physics and have reached opposite conclusions about whether or not emergence and downward causation represent genuine phenomena. While McLaughlin concludes that emergence is impossible in the light of quantum mechanics, Hendry regards issues connected with the status of molecular structure as supporting emergence. The present author suggests that one should not be persuaded by either of these arguments and pleads for a form of agnosticism over the reality of emergence and downward causation until further studies might be carried out.

Jonathan Schaffer has argued that a contrastive causal ontology is beneficial in juridical contexts: lawyers and judges should treat the causal relation as a quaternary relation, not as binary one. In this paper we investigate to what extent a contrastive causal ontology is beneficial in genetics and in physics. We conclude that it is beneficial in these scientific domains. We also point out that the nature of the benefit differs in the three context (law, genetics, physics) that we discuss.

Philosophical Studies, 2007

Despite recent efforts to improve on counterfactual theories of causation, failures to explain how effects depend on their causes are still manifest in a variety of cases. In particular, theories that do a decent job explaining cases of causal preemption have problems accounting for cases of causal intransitivity. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the counterfactual accounts makes it difficult to see why the concept of causation would be such a central part of our cognition. In this paper, I propose an account of our causal thinking that not only explains the hitherto puzzling variety of causal judgments, but also makes it intelligible why we would employ such an elusive concept.

Topoi, 2016

Philosophical works on actual causation make wide use of thought experiments. The principal aim of this paper is to show how thought experiments are used in the contemporary debate over actual causation and to discuss their role in relation to formal approaches in terms of causal models. I claim that a recourse to thought experiments is not something old fashioned or superseded by abstract models, but it is useful to interpret abstract models themselves and to use our intuitions to judge the results of the model. Recent research on actual causation has stressed the importance of integrating formal models with some notion of normality; I suggest that thought experiments can be useful in eliciting intuitions where normality is not intended in a statistical sense. The first expository part (1–3) gives a short presentation of the notion of actual causation, summarising some typical problems of counterfactual approaches and how they are treated in causal and structural models. The second part (4–7) works on the problems of model isomorphism and criticises some radical ideas opposing the role of mental experiments, claiming that they may also be of use in evaluating formal models.