Can Interventionists Be Neo-Russellians? Interventionism, the Open Systems Argument, and the Arrow of Entropy

Abstract

Several proponents of the interventionist theory of causation have recently argued for a neo-Russellian account of causation. The article discusses two strategies for interventionists to be neo-Russellians. First, I argue that the open systems argument—the main argument for a neo-Russellian account advocated by interventionists—fails. Second, I explore and discuss an alternative for interventionists who wish to be neo-Russellians: the statistical–mechanical account. Although the latter account is an attractive alternative, it is argued that interventionists are not able to adopt it straightforwardly. Hence, to be neo-Russellians remains a challenge for interventionists.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Holly Anderson, Andreas Bartels, Alexander Bird, Lars Daenzer, John Earman, Frederick Eberhardt, Matt Farr, Laura Franklin-Hall, Mathias Frisch, Luke Glynn, Andreas Hüttemann, Jenann Ismael, Siegfried Jaag, Marie Kaiser, Jens Kipper, James Ladyman, Marc Lange, Dennis Lehmkuhl, Barry Loewer, John Norton, John T. Roberts, Alex Rosenberg, Jacob Rosenthal, Jonathan Schaffer, Markus Schrenk, Wolfgang Spohn, Michael Strevens, Brad Weslake, Daniel Wohlfarth, and James Woodward, the fellows at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh during the academic year 2012–2013, and many others for their stimulating comments on earlier drafts and presentations. My research is funded by the DFG Research Group ‘Causation and Explanation’ (University of Cologne) and the Center for Philosophy of Science (University of Pittsburgh). Most special thanks to Maria Kronfeldner for her support.

Notes

[1] Alternative ways of spelling out metaphysical dependence are, for instance, the grounding relation (Schaffer 2009) and weak metaphysical emergence (Wilson 2010). Another—although controversial—option is the primacy of physics constraint (Ladyman and Ross 2007, 44).

[2] This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

[3] As these philosophers point out, causation is often characterized by these features not only in ordinary discourse but also in special science discourse. In this respect, it is misleading to call the notion of causation a ‘folk’ notion. However, I will adopt the term ‘folk features’ of causation, as it is an established and useful term in the debate.

[4] Time-symmetry is often understood in terms of time-reversal invariance in the sense that if the fundamental laws permit a sequence $ of states of a physical system S₁(t₁), …, S_n(t_n), then they also permit the temporally reversed sequence $^# of states S^#_n(t_n), …, S^#₁(t₁). See Albert (2000, 2–9), Earman (2002), North (2008), and Arntzenius and Greaves (2009) for a detailed discussion of interpretation of time-reversal invariance in various branches of physics.

[5] On notation: X, Y, … denote variables, and x, y, … represent values of variables. ‘X = x’ is a statement, which expresses the proposition that the variable X takes the value x.

[6] One might worry that conceptually non-reductive explications of causation are viciously circular (Strevens 2007, 245). This is a serious challenge to interventionism. However, I will not address this problem here and suppose, for the sake of the argument, that this kind of circularity is not vicious as the proponents of the non-reductive explication argue (Woodward 2003, 104–107).

[7] ‘By contrast to Pearl's and Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines's work, I have nothing to say about issues having to with calculating quantitative magnitudes, estimation, identifiability, or causal inference. Instead, my enterprise is, roughly, to provide an account of the meaning or content of just those qualitative causal notions that Pearl (and perhaps Spirtes et al.) take as primitive. Because my project is semantic or interpretative, and is not intended as a contribution to practical problems of causal inference…’ (Woodward 2003, 38).

[8] See also Price and Weslake (2010, section 6.3).

[9] One might oppose this view of the subject matter of fundamental physical theories. However, this concern will be ignored for the sake of the argument.

[10] Woodward's worlds should be understood as model worlds or small worlds, i.e. assignments of values to variables in a causal model (Pearl 2000, 207). In this respect, Woodwardian worlds differ from Lewisian worlds because the latter are as detailed and concrete as the real spatio-temporal entity we inhabit (Hüttemann 2004, 113).

[11] For a more elaborate discussion of this point, including details of measures of closeness, and a discussion of other semantics for counterfactuals such as Goodmanian and suppositionalist approaches, see Reutlinger (2013, chs. 3, 8). The arguments in this article do not depend on any particular choice of semantics.

[12] Note that Elga carefully observes that non-c is a time-reversed state (Elga 2001, 316). For the sake of brevity, I will skip the details of this point here (see Farr and Reutlinger 2013).

[13] Ney (2009, 753) presents a billiard ball example on a less cosmological scale to illustrate the same point.

[14] Woodward refers to Strevens's (2003) account of objective probabilities. I think the analogy with the account by Albert, Loewer, and Kutach is even more striking: they intend to account for the truth-makers of causal statements in a similar way as Strevens approaches the truth-makers of higher-level probability statements. It might be worth exploring the unique features of Strevens's account. However, this project has to be carried out on another occasion.

[15] Albert and Loewer suppose, for simplicity's sake, that the fundamental laws are the laws of classical mechanics.

[16] Let us adopt this simple version in order to not complicate the argument unnecessarily.

[17] It does not matter for the problem at hand whether acausal nomic facts reduce to acausal particular facts, as Humean neo-Russellians, such as Loewer, hold.

[18] Loewer (2007, 2009) argues that (PH) should be regarded as a law according to the best systems account of laws. (PH) is law, according to Loewer, because adding (PH) to a deductive system optimizes its simplicity and strength (see Roberts 2008, 20–24, for objections). However, it does not matter for the goal of this paper whether Loewer is correct about the lawhood of (PH). The crucial point is that Loewer and other neo-Russellians who use the SM account believe that the fundamental dynamical laws (be they Newton's laws of motion, Einstein's field equations, or the Schrödinger equation) are non-causal because they are time-symmetric.

[19] Strevens (2007, 246) suggests a fourth option—a ‘two-factor semantics’ inspired by Putnam's work. I will not discuss this option (and Strevens's objections to it) because, as Strevens correctly observes, adopting two-factor semantics implies that the interventionist account is an epistemic account of causation. Similarly, I omit alternative accounts of meaning that do not rely on truth-conditional semantics, such as accounts of meaning in terms of acceptability or testability conditions. These accounts require more radical departures from Woodward's actual intuitions about meaning. However, this does not imply that it is impossible (or even unattractive) to frame an interventionist theory in terms of, say, acceptability conditions.