PHI403 Lecture 13 — Digging Deeper to Find the Real Causes

On levels of explanation and the direction of causation between them. Reductionism is the dominant scientific methodology: explain higher-level events (tiredness, depression, society) by lower-level ones (bacteria, chemistry, individuals, neurons).

Ontological reductionism faces two problems:

Loss at lower levels — art is not just colours and light waves; society is not just a collection of individuals; mind is not just neurons.
Necessary but not sufficient — "my arm needs molecules to move, but I can't move my arm by moving my molecules".

Emergence: new properties / laws appear at higher levels.

Weak emergence — epistemic; prediction from the lower level is hard, but ontology is still bottom-up.
Strong emergence — ontological; higher-level properties are genuinely new.

Holism — only wholes are causally powerful; parts' causal roles depend on context. Genes cause as parts of living cells; cells as parts of organisms; organisms in environments (Lewontin, The Triple Helix, 1998).

Demergence (Anjum & Mumford 2017) — higher-level processes produce new properties at a lower level: stress causing physiological changes, education causing better diet.

The net result is a picture where causation travels up, down, and across levels — irreconcilable with strict reductionism but congenial to dispositionalism.

Connections

Back-link: sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-causation-in-science. Concepts: concepts/mechanisms-in-science · concepts/dispositionalism · concepts/causation.