nucleation

LIT-1933: Why there isn't inter-level causation in mechanisms

1 min read

Properties2
StatusUnfetched — A lawful free copy was located 2026-11-01 and could not be fetched: the author's accepted version on PhilSci-Archive, https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12956/1/fr_interlevelmechanisms_final.pdf. The server's certificate chain ends in a root this client does not trust (TLS "unable to get local issuer certificate"), a second fetcher got HTTP 503, the Wayback capture (20240603160454) reset the connection, and CORE's copy (core.ac.uk/download/157867512.pdf) returned a Cloudflare challenge, which was not pursued. The Springer version is paywalled. Free copy: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12956/1/fr_interlevelmechanisms_final.pdf.
Tagsphilosophy-of-science, causality, metaphysics

Graph View

Romero, F. (2015). Why there isn’t inter-level causation in mechanisms. Synthese, 192(11), 3731–3755.

Key takeaways

Not read. From catalogue descriptions of the abstract and from the works read beside it:

  • The abstract, as catalogues give it, proposes “to explain inter-level relations without inter-level causation by appealing to the notion of fat-handed interventions”.
  • Baumgartner and Casini (NOTE-1490, their footnote 6): “Romero (2015) and Eronen and Brooks (2014, 194) have recently argued that it follows from non-reductive physicalism and interventionism that interventions on phenomena are necessarily fat-handed (or common causes)”.
  • Baumgartner, Casini and Krickel (NOTE-1494) cite it with Baumgartner and Gebharter as having shown “that upper and lower levels of mechanisms can only be manipulated via common causes” (pp. 2–3, 6).

Standing in the record

Bears on CLAIM-526 and CLAIM-480: whether a collective variable acts on the activity that realizes it, or only coexists with it. Read it before leaning on it there.

Backlinks