#JuarreroBook Ch. 1

This chapter is stage setting for where we seem to be headed: understanding context- dependent interdependencies

“Relational types are real and coherent patterns of energy flow, structure, and activities that form locally from contextually constrained interactions among individuals and that, in turn, as coherent dynamics, constrain the individuals and circumstances from which they emerge. Reimagining cause-and- effect relations, especially mereological relations between parts and wholes, and the influence of context and history on those relations, will be the hinge on which this reformulation turns”. Pg 20

I understand this to mean that the goal is setting out a perspective that gives a proper role to interactions (as are crucial for complex systems) can reshape our understanding of what makes something ‘a thing’, that is, how it ‘coheres’ (or ‘hangs together’), in such a way that we will be able to make sense of currently seemingly problematic cause-effect relations such as “mental causation” (how can my intentions cause something) or ‘downward causation’ (higher levels seemingly exert causal effects on lower levels) that invariably arise in a picture of the world where at root is physics, and higher level properties, ‘objects’, or theories as they figure in higher level disciplines (chemistry, biology, social sciences) and in our everyday life are to be understood in terms of (‘reduced to’) lower level properties, ‘objects’ or theories of physics.

The key inter-related themes crucial to this ‘reimagining’ that makes relations and interactions real lie in reconsidering mereology (part-whole relations), the notion of ‘cause’ (as more than just billiard ball, “efficient causation”), and the role of context (space and time) as more than just a container in which entities are plonked

Did I get that right?

@UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org

@uh @MolemanPeter @UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @dcm@social.sunet.se

#JuarreroBook

Thanks for your thoughts Ulrike and Peter! I agree that those seem to be the aims of the book as stated in this chapter. However, I rather disliked this chapter. It provides a rather partial, oversimplified, and partly false historical reconstruction of many of the topics mentioned, making the dialectical setup rather unconvincing to me. In more detail: - the points about relations, interactions and context being seen as irrelevant or causally impotent fails to take into consideration the past 20 years or so of work on neo-mechanistic explanation, e.g. Bechtel, who tackle these things explicitly - similarly, the supposed mainstream consensus that cause and effect are purely a matter of energy-transferring processes does not exist. Currently (one of) the most influential theories of cause-effect is manipulationism (e.g. work by Woodward), in which energy-transfer plays no central role - it is not true that the consensus is that tokens of a kind differ only in secondary properties. Her own example of scorpions belonging to the same species denies this, as each scorpion differs from each other in many of their primary properties. There seems to be a conflation between primary properties and essential properties in her treatment. - saying in p.8 that the reason Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was controversial due just to its rejection of essence and immutability is a wild oversimplification - the whole depiction of reductionism is rather uncharitable, focusing exclusively on its crudest version, which pretty much no philosopher subscribes to today. Moreover, reductionism has been attacked and rejected by many philosophers of science already starting in the 70's, so it's very far from being anything like being the mainstream view - same for causation being only to be found at the level of quarks and electrons (actually, it's the opposite, it's difficult to make sense of causation at that level). Very few philosophers subscribe to this strong view. - there is a crude misinterpretation of the nature and motivations of Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness, oversimplifying the whole debate. - on p.17, she seems to imply that naturalistic accounts of mind are just a no-go in current philosophy. The opposite is the case. Since at least the 1950s very few are dualists, and from the 70s on there has been a flurry of work on how to naturalise the mind, with a rather broad consensus around some version of functionalism + teleosemantics today. - the ontological picture she claims to be mainstream in philosophy today, the desert landscape sort of approach, is anything but. Since the 70's philosophers have been claiming that ontology, natural kinds, etc., are legion and go much beyond the kinds posited in physics.

In brief, I found this first chapter very frustrating. Hopefully the positive view she wants to put forward will not suffer from the weakness of this first, mostly negative chapter.

What do you think?