Does the Interventionist Notion of Causation Deliver Us from the Fear of Epiphenomenalism?

Abstract

This article reviews the causal exclusion argument and confronts it with some recently proposed refutations based on the interventionist account of causation. I first show that there are several technical and interpretative difficulties in applying the interventionist account to the exclusion issue. Different ways of accommodating the two to one another are considered and all are shown to leave the issue without a fully satisfactory resolution. Lastly, I argue that, on the most consistent construal, the interventionist approach can provide grounds for thinking that higher-level causal notions are as legitimate as lower-level causal notions, but it does not provide grounds for postulating inter-level causal interactions.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous referees of International Studies in the Philosophy of Science for their critical comments. This study has been financially supported by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Waldemar von Frenckell Foundation, the Alfred Kordelin Foundation, the Otto A. Malm Foundation and the Oskar Öflund Foundation.

Notes

Note that treating M and P as binary variables collapses the distinction between token and type causation: the question whether changing M changes P* collapses into question whether changing the value of M from 1 to 0 (or vice versa) changes the value of P* from 1 to 0 (or vice versa).

Note that to reach this conclusion one has to assume that the idea that the realizers of M are causally sufficient for P* amounts to the assumption that the value of P* is 0 when the value of each of the realizers of M is 0. To be precise, this assumption is not entailed by the earlier formulation of causal sufficiency.

Perhaps an objection should be anticipated. One could point out that the relationship between chocolate and theobromine is not in many ways analogous to the relationship between M and its realizer P. This is certainly true. But the analogy still holds in essential parts: theobromine realizes the functional role of chocolate as a killer and it is thus inessential that the relationship between chocolate and theobromine is not as tight as the relationship between M and P. This case is a typical example of how the functional identities of substances as certain kinds of drugs or poisons are anchored to the ‘active ingredients’ at a molecular level.