What is Causal Specificity About, and What is it Good for in Philosophy of Biology?

María Ferreira Ruiz

doi:10.1007/s10441-021-09419-x

Abstract

The concept of causal specificity is drawing considerable attention from philosophers of biology. It became the rationale for rejecting (and occasionally, accepting) a thesis of causal parity of developmental factors. This literature assumes that attributing specificity to causal relations is at least in principle a straightforward (if not systematic) task. However, the parity debate in philosophy of biology seems to be stuck at a point where it is not the biological details that will help move forward. In this paper, I take a step back to reexamine the very idea of causal specificity and its intended role in the parity dispute in philosophy of biology. I contend that the idea of causal specificity across variations as currently discussed in the literature is irreducibly twofold in nature: it is about two independent components that are not mutually entailed. I show this to be the source of prior complications with the notion of specificity itself that ultimately affect the purposes for which it is often invoked, notably to settle the parity dispute.

Highlights

The philosophy of causation has put the focus on the project of distinguishing causes from non-causes by clarifying what it is to be a cause
This is the sense of specificity features in the causal parity debate, and has to do, in a nutshell, with the possibility that many different changes in the cause led to many different changes in the effect
Along the last few sections, I argued, contrary to what is assumed, that a quantitative view of specificity is not as intelligible and cannot be applied as systematically as it would be desirable for certain contexts –the causal parity quarrel in philosophy of biology being a salient case in point

Summary

Introduction

The philosophy of causation has put the focus on the project of distinguishing causes from non-causes by clarifying what it is to be a cause. Regardless of the stance taken with respect to the causal parity of developmental factors, there is a consensus view that specificity captures an interesting and distinct feature of causal relations In this context, two things seem clear to me. 5, I raise a paradoxical reading of the so-called “switch-like” causal structures in order to reveal the dual nature of causal specificity and clarify its components and their mutual independence This is identified as the source of the difficulties explained in Sect. 6 concerning the specific/nonspecific distinction and how to attribute causal specificity The consequences of such difficulties for the parity dispute in philosophy of biology (the success of specificity-based arguments), and ways to deal with those difficulties, are examined in Sect.

Causal Parity and the Specificity Argument

What Kind of Distinctions does Specificity Enable?

Two Components of Causal Specificity

Attributing Causal Specificity

Implications for the Causal Parity Dispute in Biology

Conclusions