Kalewold, K.H. orcid.org/0000-0001-7113-8670 (2024) The hybrid account of activities. Synthese, 203 (1). 29.
Abstract
According to an influential account of the new mechanistic philosophy of science, entities and activities compose mechanisms. However, the new mechanists have paid too little attention to activities. Critics have charged that accounts of activities in the new mechanism literature are philosophically uninformative and opaque. This paper defends a novel account of causally productive activities, which I call the Hybrid Account, that marries the two dominant philosophical approaches to causation: production and difference-making. The Hybrid Account of Activities (HAA) identifies causally productive activities as robust difference-makers to the next stage of a mechanism. The Hybrid Account provides attractive solutions to causal identification and causal selection problems faced by earlier activities views.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Activities; Mechanisms; Causation; Explanation; Production; Difference-making |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 Jan 2024 14:21 |
Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2024 14:21 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04452-4 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11229-023-04452-4 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:207905 |