Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance

Abstract

Constitutive mechanistic explanations are said to refer to mechanisms that constitute the phenomenon-to-be-explained. The most prominent approach of how to understand this relation is Carl Craver's mutual manipulability approach (MM) to constitutive relevance. Recently, MM has come under attack (Baumgartner and Casini 2017; Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015; Harinen 2014; Kästner 2017; Leuridan 2012; Romero 2015). It is argued that MM is inconsistent because, roughly, it is spelled out in terms of interventionism (which is an approach to causation), whereas constitutive relevance is said to be a non-causal relation. In this paper, I will discuss a strategy of how to resolve this inconsistency—so-called fat-handedness approaches (Baumgartner and Casini 2017; Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015; Romero 2015). I will argue that these approaches are problematic. I will present a novel suggestion for how to consistently define constitutive relevance in terms of interventionism. My approach is based on a causal interpretation of manipulability in terms of causal relations between the mechanism's components and what I will call temporal EIO-parts of the phenomenon. Still, this interpretation accounts for the fundamental difference between constitutive relevance and causal relevance.