Interventions and Mechanistic Hierarchies
Final Report Abstract
Sciences such as biology, neuroscience, sociology, and political science provide explanations in terms of mechanisms: They explain how systems behave by pointing at causal interactions among their parts. The theoretical details of how the parts responsible for these systems’ behaviors (the constitutively relevant parts) can be identified on the basis of experiments is not well understood yet and controversially discussed in the philosophy of science literature. The main problem is that the notions of experimental manipulations predominantly used in the literature are not suitable for part-whole systems. This project investigated the conceptual possibility of interventions on such systems, the question of how to model and utilize them, and the question of how relationships of causation and constitution can be systematically uncovered in such systems. It also shedded new light on the metaphysical background assumptions required to apply already existing causal modeling techniques to different epistemic goals such as representation and inference. A special focus was also given to the often cyclic nature of mechanistic systems and the question of how it can be addressed in terms of static and dynamic causal models.
Publications
-
Quantifying Proportionality and the Limits of Higher-Level Causation and Explanation. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 74(3), 573-601.
Gebharter, Alexander & Eronen, Markus I.
-
The Insufficiency of Statistics for Detecting Racial Discrimination by Police. Philosophy of Science, 91(5), 1089-1097.
Weinberger, Naftali
