UC Philosophy Colloquium Redux

42nd Annual UC Philosophy Colloquium and Taft Lectures: Scientific Explanation

Friday, May 12 - Saturday, May 13 and Tuesday, May 17 - Wednesday, May 18

All talks take place on the West Campus of the University of Cincinnati. (Directions.)

Friday Afternoon 3:30-6:00
McMicken 53

James Woodward, California Institute of Technology, "Sensitive and Insensitive Causation"

The sensitivity of a counterfactual relationship between the variables X and Y has to do, roughly, with whether that relationship would remain stable or would continue to hold under changes in background circumstances that involve variables that do not explicitly figure in the relationship. (I take the notion of sensitivity from David Lewis’ discussion of what he calls "sensitive causation”.) In this talk I will illustrate, by reference to a number of specific examples, how a focus on this notion of sensitivity can be used to illuminate a number of features of our causal judgments, both in ordinary life and in science. These examples will include the role of omissions as causes, our practices of causal attribution in genetics (why we are inclined to resist Richard Dawkins' claim that there are genes that cause reading, despite the fact that in some populations whether people learn to read is counterfactually dependent on whether they have those genes), and a notion of "causal importance" employed in evolutionary biology.

Discussant: Robert Skipper, UC

Saturday Morning 9:30-12:00
McMicken 43

Michael Strevens, New York University, "The Explanatory Role of Irreducible Properties"

I aim to reconcile two apparently conflicting theses:
1.      Everything that can be explained, can be explained in purely physical terms, that is, using the machinery of fundamental physics, and
2.      Some properties that play an explanatory role in the higher level sciences are irreducible (e.g., species properties, or so I will assume).
My strategy is to show that the explanatory work done by the irreducible properties can also be done by fundamental physics, despite that fact that physics, by assumption, cannot articulate the nature of the properties. The principal obstacle to this strategy is that the irreducible properties themselves bear a relation of explanatory relevance to the facts to be explained, from which it would appear to follow that they figure in the explanations essentially. The way out of the difficulty is to investigate the nature of the relevance relation, and to show that when irreducible properties are explanatorily relevant, it is in virtue of their extension alone. They are irreducible because physics cannot capture their essence; this is no obstacle, however, to physics’ more or less capturing their extension, which is all that it need do to duplicate their explanatory power.

Discussant: Thomas Polger, UC

Saturday Afternoon  1:00-3:30
McMicken 43

William Bechtel, University of California at San Diego "Mechanism and Biological Explanation"

Explanations in biology do not fit traditional philosophical models of explanation via subsumption under laws and a number of philosophers have recently begun to articulate a conception of mechanistic explanation more adequate to biology. I will provide a brief overview of the emerging treatment of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation. These accounts, however, are insufficiently biological in that they do not attend to the distinctive forms of organization required in biological organisms. Biological organisms are autonomous systems which must be able to recruit matter and energy from their environment and deploy them to develop and repair themselves. Of particular importance in such systems are cyclic patterns of organization. I will explore the importance of cyclic organization for maintaining autonomy and its implications for thinking about biological mechanisms.

Discussant: John Bickle, UC

Saturday Afternoon 3:30-6:00
McMicken 43

Carl Craver, Washington University, "Constitutive Relevance in Mechanistic Explanations"

How should we understand the relationship of explanatory relevance that holds between a component in a mechanism and the behavior of a mechanism as a whole? Most philosophical discussion of explanatory relevance focuses exclusively the relationship between antecedent causes and the phenomena to be explained. Those in the broadly causal-mechanical tradition have understood etiological relevance as causal relevance. In much of contemporary science, however, most causal-mechanical explanations show how a property or behavior of a mechanism as a whole is explained by the properties, activities, and organizational features of the components in the mechanism. The relationship of explanatory relevance between a mechanism as a whole and the properties, activities, and organizational features of its components (that is, constitutive relevance) cannot be glossed as causal relevance. In this paper, I articulate the problem of constitutive relevance. I show that one cannot have a complete philosophical account of mechanistic explanation without addressing this problem. I consider and reject some putative solutions. I close by suggesting that constitutive explanatory relevance can be understood, at least partly, as a relationship of mutual manipulability holding between the behavior of a mechanism as a whole and the properties, activities, and organization of its components.

Discussant: Tony Landreth, UC

Tuesday Afternoon, May 17th, 4:00-6:00 PM
Taft House, University of Cincinnati

Nancy Cartwright, London School of Economics, "Causal Explanation: What Use is It?"

Wednesday Afternoon, May 18th, 4:00 -6:00 PM
Taft House, University of Cincinnati

"How far does Explanation Stretch in Physics: Some Insights from Social Science"