Activities and Causation: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Mechanisms

Abstract

This article deals with mechanisms conceived as composed of entities and activities. In response to many perplexities about the nature of activities, a number of arguments are developed concerning their epistemic and ontological status. Some questions concerning the relations between cause and causal explanation and mechanisms are also addressed.

Notes

Correspondence: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. E‐mail: [email protected]

I think “regular” should be dropped from the definition. Jim Bogen has argued forcefully that there might be mechanisms that operate only once in a while or even one that works only once.

I still wonder what the best analogy with “cause” is. I first thought “cause” was syncategorimatic, like “good” (cf. Lycan and Machamer 1973). Later I thought it maybe was closer to other philosophical categories, like “being” or “justice”. However, people write large books about such concepts, though they also write about cause and even about good. Maybe all such books fail in the same way books about cause must fail. John Norton (2004) directly argues that particular instances of causes in physics are all right, but that cause, in general, is incoherent. I think he and I agree on many things. I am here following Jim Bogen who tried to persuade me that “cause” is just a genus term, like “organism”.

The reference here is primarily to Jim Woodward's work, though others have followed his lead.

Jim Tabery has argued that we should also talk about interaction as well as activity. Here, and in MDC (2000), it may have been unclear that activity is meant to include activities that are mutually effective and affected. There is no dispute about interaction if the “action” part is taken to refer to activities (so they'll be interactivities), and not as is usually done to refer to relations that exist among static states.

Halliday and Resnik (1986, 396) write interestingly in a footnote describing the first law of thermodynamics: “Here dQ and dW, unlike dU, are not real differentials. There are, for example, no such functions as Q(p, v) or W(p, v) because Q and W refer to transitions between states of system and not to the states themselves. dQ and dW are called inexact differentials …”

There may be a deep point to be made here. It may be that productive change or activity is both epistemically and ontologically fundamental to our knowledge. This could parallel what was said about fundamental equations being differentials that describe dynamic continuous processes. In its turn, this could be used as basis for an argument that becoming, the active, precedes being, the passive. This idea certainly is too ponderous to lift here.

Wayne Wu suggested this terminology to me. It seems to me a good case where one might follow Wilfrid Sellars's advice and solve a putative philosophical problem by drawing a distinction.

Jonathan Schaffer (2000) makes a case for disconnection as a cause that is quite compelling. Reading along with him, one almost wants to agree until finding out that this leads to a Humean conditions approach to causation. Here my intuitions boil because of the inactivity of the cause. But then one person's reductio is another's proof. I think, however, we may have it both ways with the causally relevant causally efficacious (or, true cause) distinction.