nucleation

LIT-1930: Constitutive Explanatory Relevance

2 min read

Properties2
StatusUnavailable — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text and none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy. The publisher, the Philosophy Documentation Center (pdcnet.org, record jpr_2007_0032_0003_0020), offers it for purchase only. Craver's Washington University CV (philosophy.wustl.edu/media/1028/download) lists it without a link, his WashU research profile has no file, and searches of PhilArchive, PhilSci-Archive and the web found no author copy. It is not on Bechtel's UCSD page, which hosts two other papers from this batch. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit.
Tagsphilosophy-of-science, mereology, causality

Graph View

Craver, C. F. (2007). Constitutive explanatory relevance. Journal of Philosophical Research, 32, 3–20 — DOI-10.5840/jpr20073241

Key takeaways

Not read. The following comes from the publisher’s abstract, as a search engine reported it, and from the abstract of Craver, Glennan and Povich (2021, LIT-1931).

  • The problem. Which components’ activities are explanatorily relevant to the behaviour of a mechanism as a whole? This relevance holds between a whole and its parts, not between distinct events, so it is not causal relevance.
  • The answer. Relevance is analysed as mutual manipulability between the behaviour of the mechanism as a whole and the properties and activities of its components. Craver, Glennan and Povich describe this as extending Woodward’s manipulationist counterfactuals to interlevel experiments.
  • The setting. Explaining the Brain (LIT-832) gives the book-length version. Neither text has been read here.

Standing in the record

Filed because the record’s claims about where maintenance is realized (CLAIM-522, CLAIM-414, CLAIM-194) turn on what makes a process a part of the system that maintains itself. That is the question constitutive relevance answers. The question the record needs answered from this text is whether the criterion’s parthood condition is taken as given. The new claim CLAIM-530 says it must be. Until the paper is read, that rests on the criterion as its successors and reviewers report it, and on Craver and Bechtel (LIT-1928), which was read.

Backlinks