nucleation

LIT-1924: Horizontal Surgicality and Mechanistic Constitution

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1494) from the authors' penultimate draft; worth keeping as the one positive interventionist result in the debate: given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, and that parthood and levels are settled, a single intervention that changes one part per level and the phenomenon simultaneously suffices for constitution (THEORY-1293).
Tagsphilosophy-of-science, causality, mereology
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1494 — Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel — horizontal surgicality
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1288 — If a mechanism's behaviour supervenes on its constituents' behaviours and constitution is not causal, every cause of that behaviour is also a cause of some constituent along another path, so no intervention can change the whole without separately changing a part; mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is then unsatisfiable, and once interventions are relaxed to admit these common causes, every model with constitutive dependence has a model without it that implies the same correlations under every manipulation, even in ideal experimental conditions, THEORY-1293 — Given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized by some constituent on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, that co-occurrence is transitive, and that the parts and their levels are already known, a single intervention that changes a part and the phenomenon simultaneously while directly changing at most one behaviour on each lower level shows that the part is a constituent; the condition presupposes the boundary and the level hierarchy it is applied to and cannot supply them

Graph View

Baumgartner, M., Casini, L., & Krickel, B. (2020). Horizontal surgicality and mechanistic constitution. Erkenntnis, 85(2), 417–430.

Read in full in NOTE-1494.

Key takeaways

  • Systematic Fat-Handedness follows from Universal Constitution and Simultaneity (p. 6).
  • Woodward’s 2015 “permissibly fat-handed” interventions presuppose the supervenience base, so a definition of constitution built on them (pFAT) is question-begging (pp. 7–8).
  • Horizontal surgicality (H, p. 9) and the sufficiency condition SUF, with an eight-line reductio (p. 10).
  • Upgrading SUF to a definition (hFAT) inherits interventionism’s questions about whether the required interventions exist (pp. 11–12).

Standing in the record

The result says what has to be given before an intervention can show constitution: parthood, a hierarchy of levels, and simultaneity. That is what the record’s own boundary claims (CLAIM-194, CLAIM-522) say cannot be read off the data. See NOTE-1494.

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