Craver, C. F., Glennan, S., & Povich, M. (2021). Constitutive relevance & mutual manipulability revisited. Synthese, 199, 8807–8828 — DOI-10.1007/s11229-021-03183-8
Key takeaways
Not read. From the published abstract, read on the Springer page on 2026-11-01.
- The definition. “Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon.”
- The criticism. The critics argue that applying Woodward’s account of intervention to constitutive relevance “conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent”. The authors reply that the criticism comes from “failing to distinguish the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects of the problem”.
- The amendment. MM becomes “a refined epistemic criterion, the ‘matched interlevel experiments’ (MIE) account”. This is “grounded in the plausible metaphysical thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness”.
Standing in the record
This is the text that would settle whether CLAIM-530 is right that the manipulability conditions take the mechanism’s boundary as given. “Causal betweenness” is the part to check. If a constituent is whatever lies causally between a phenomenon’s input and its output, then an outside controller that closes the production loop lies between them too. On that reading, betweenness alone does not put the controller outside the system any more than mutual manipulability does. That is the question for CLAIM-522 and QUESTION-086. Until a copy is read it is only a question.