nucleation

LIT-1934: Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1493) from the authors' penultimate draft; worth keeping as the proof that, if constitution is non-causal and wholes supervene on their parts, every cause of a whole's behaviour is a common cause of it and of some part's, so mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is unsatisfiable and, once relaxed, gives no evidence of constitution (THEORY-1288).
Tagsphilosophy-of-science, causality, mereology
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1493 — Baumgartner & Gebharter — fat-handedness
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-1294 — Constitution is best inferred, and only abductively, from the failure to break a coupling: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is also a cause of some member of the set, no smaller set does as much, and no expansion of the variables studied turns up a cause of the phenomenon that spares them all, so constitutive relevance is fixed by the set a part belongs to and no finite series of experiments settles it

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Baumgartner, M., & Gebharter, A. (2016). Constitutive relevance, mutual manipulability, and fat-handedness. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 67(3), 731–756.

Read in full in NOTE-1493.

Key takeaways

  • Under supervenience and non-causal constitution, top-down ideal interventions on a whole with respect to its parts cannot exist (pp. 10–13), so mutual manipulability under Woodward 2003 entails that there is no constitution.
  • Under Woodward’s relaxed interventions, it entails that whole and parts are causally related, contradicting non-causal constitution (pp. 15–17).
  • A temporal clause restores consistency (pp. 17–18), but all mutual manipulations are then common causes, and a model with no constitutive dependence implies the same correlations (pp. 18–20).
  • The fat-handedness criterion: infer constitution when every intervention on the whole turns out, as the variable set is expanded, to be a common cause of it and some part (pp. 20–22). Only inductive.

Standing in the record

The sharpest statement of what the record’s intervention results can and cannot show about where a capacity is realized. It bears on CLAIM-522, CLAIM-515 and QUESTION-284; the bearing is set out in the note and in CLAIM-528.

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