nucleation

LIT-1939: An Abductive Theory of Constitution

1 min read

Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1490) from the authors' penultimate draft; worth keeping for the claim that, unlike causation, constitution has no experimentum crucis, and for its alternative: constitution is inferred abductively from a redundancy-free common-cause coupling of whole and parts that no expansion of the variable set breaks (THEORY-1288, THEORY-1294).
Tagsphilosophy-of-science, causality, mereology
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1490 — Baumgartner & Casini — abductive theory of constitution
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

Graph View

Baumgartner, M., & Casini, L. (2017). An abductive theory of constitution. Philosophy of Science, 84(2), 214–233.

Read in full in NOTE-1490.

Key takeaways

  • Mutual manipulability fails “in all cases”, not some: the required surgical interventions are impossible in principle (pp. 6–8).
  • Constitutive underdetermination is of a different kind from causal underdetermination: the confounding is introduced by the manipulation itself, so idealizing the experiment does not remove it (pp. 10–11).
  • No De-Coupling (NDC, p. 15): parthood, redundancy-free common-cause coupling, and coupling unbroken under every expansion of the variable set. Constitution is defined by the impossibility of top-down and bottom-up interventions, not their possibility.
  • Constitutive relevance is extrinsic to a part–whole pair, set-relative, but not relativized (pp. 16–17).

Standing in the record

Its answer to “what evidence tells constitution from causal modification” is the answer QUESTION-284 asks for, for one kind of constitution. See NOTE-1490.

Backlinks