Leuridan, B. (2012). Three problems for the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance in mechanisms. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63(2), 399–427.
Key takeaways
Not read. From the abstract (Ghent University’s Biblio record) and from the works filed beside it:
- Constitution threatens to collapse into causation. The abstract: “constitutive relevance threatens to imply causal relevance despite Craver (and Bechtel)‘s claim that they are strictly distinct”. Baumgartner and Gebharter report the conclusion as “Causal relevance (sensu latu) thus comes in two varieties: intralevel etiological relevance (or causal relevance sensu strictu) and interlevel relevance” (Leuridan p. 424, quoted in NOTE-1493), and grant that if constitution is not assumed non-causal, mutual manipulability under Woodward’s definitions does reduce it to a causal relation.
- Parthood as spatiotemporal inclusion fails. The abstract: “if (as is intuitively appealing) parthood is defined in terms of spatio-temporal inclusion, then the mutual manipulability account is prone to counter-examples, as I show by a case of endosymbiosis.” Baumgartner, Casini and Krickel nonetheless take the Parthood principle from Leuridan’s p. 410.
- A methodological problem, “a case of experimental underdetermination”, with “two partial, but fallible solutions based on the notions of parthood and synchronicity”.
Standing in the record
Filed because it opened the line of criticism the three works read here develop. Its endosymbiosis case bears directly on the record’s questions about whether a boundary is given or produced (CLAIM-194, QUESTION-284): if a symbiont inside a cell counts as part of it by inclusion, inclusion is not what makes a part. That reading is from the abstract and has not been checked against the text.