Andreas Hüttemann

Andreas Hüttemann disagrees with Hill and Ott regarding the relevance of the early modern critiques of causal powers for contemporary practitioners. He argues that the contemporary acceptance of powers and dispositions is insulated against the early modern criticism because the emergence of powers nowadays is not a ‘revival of’ or ‘return to’ the Aristotelian or scholastic version of causal powers. Hüttemann traverses two lines of argumentation in his defence of the contemporary metaphysics of powers. First, he maintains that the early modern critics utilized a version of causation that, because it was rooted in the doctrine of substantial forms, was quite strong and restrictive and that, consequently, their criticisms don’t apply to contemporary notions of powers, which utilize a counterfactual conception of causation. Then, he turns in a different direction to defend Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie’s use of the Extrapolation Argument in favour of the postulation of dispositions and powers.

In this paper I argue against readings of Hertz that overly assimilate him into the thought of late 20th century anti-realists and pluralists. Firstly, as is well-known, various images of the same objects are possible according to Hertz. However, I will argue that this envisaged pluralism concerns the situation before all the evidence is considered i. e. before we can decide whether the images are correct and appropriate. Hertz believes in final and decisive battles of the kind he participated in while doing experiments in electrodynamics. Secondly, I will argue that the concept of representation is still quite appropriately applied to important aspects of images, namely when it comes to fundamental physical equations. In this context Hertz explicitly allows that “characteristics of our image, which claim to represent observable relations of things, do really and correctly correspond to them” (Hertz [1894] 1956, 9). A final consideration is Hertz’s consistent appeal to the concept of the hypothesis. I will argue that his use of the concept does not indicate that he contributed to an increasing hypothetization of science, if this trend is understood in a strong sense, i. e. as the belief that the correctness of scientific theories cannot be established for principled reasons. As mentioned, when it comes to experimental evidence Hertz believes in decisive battles.

'Microphysicalism', the view that whole objects behave the way they do in virtue of the behaviour of their constituent parts, is an influential contemporary view with a long philosophical and scientific heritage. In _What's Wrong With Microphysicalism?_ Andreas Hüttemann offers a fresh challenge to this view. Hüttemann agrees with the microphysicalists that we can explain compound systems by explaining their parts, but claims that this does not entail a fundamentalism that gives hegemony to the micro-level. At most, it shows that there is a relationship of determination between parts and wholes, but there is no justification for taking this relationship to be asymmetrical rather than one of mutual dependence. Hüttemann argues that if this is the case, then microphysicalists have no right to claim that the micro-level is the ultimate agent: neither the parts nor the whole have 'ontological priority'. Hüttemann advocates a pragmatic pluralism, allowing for different ways to describe nature. _What's Wrong With Microphysicalism?_ is a convincing and original contribution to central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics.

In the first part of this chapter, the role and embeddedness of Inductive Metaphysics (IM) in contemporary philosophy are discussed, in comparison to competing metaphysical programs, including the relation to conceptual a priori metaphysics as well as to other a posteriori programs in metaphysics. The basic methodological principles of IM are explained, consisting of (1) the employment of inductive and abductive methods and (2) making use of empirical sources. In the second part, important challenges for the methodology of IM are investigated. These challenges arise from the fact that theories of IM have to be justified by abductive inferences that introduce new theoretical concepts. Two rationality criteria are proposed in order to distinguish scientifically meaningful metaphysical theories from pure speculations: (i) the unification of empirical facts or laws by metaphysical theories, and (ii) the independent testability of metaphysical theories by entailing use‑novel empirical consequences.

This paper consists of two parts which are linked by Mary Hesse’s notion of negative analogy. In the first part I will characterise the context into which this notion was introduced, i.e. the discourse on models and analogies which Hesse reacts to and her own work from some papers in the 1950ies to her book on Models and Analogies (Hesse, 1966). One important distinction she draws in this book is between positive, neutral and negative analogies. In the second part of the paper, I will start with an observation by Hesse on negative analogies and will argue this has far reaching consequences for the metaphysics of science. It allows us to see how we can have empirical access to natural modalities.

The compact and, with \ M\, very massive object located at the center of the Milky Way is currently the very best candidate for a supermassive black hole in our immediate vicinity. The strongest evidence for this is provided by measurements of stellar orbits, variable X-ray emission, and strongly variable polarized near-infrared emission from the location of the radio source Sagittarius A* in the middle of the central stellar cluster. Simultaneous near-infrared and X-ray observations of SgrA* have revealed insights into the emission mechanisms responsible for the powerful near-infrared and X-ray flares from within a few tens to one hundred Schwarzschild radii of such a putative SMBH. If SgrA* is indeed a SMBH it will, in projection onto the sky, have the largest event horizon and will certainly be the first and most important target for very long baseline interferometry observations currently being prepared by the event horizon telescope. These observations in combination with the infrared interferometry experiment GRAVITY at the very large telescope interferometer and other experiments across the electromagnetic spectrum might yield proof for the presence of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The large body of evidence continues to discriminate the identification of SgrA* as a SMBH from alternative possibilities. It is, however, unclear when the ever mounting evidence for SgrA* being associated with a SMBH will suffice as a convincing proof. Additional compelling evidence may come from future gravitational wave observatories. This manuscript reviews the observational facts, theoretical grounds and conceptual aspects for the case of SgrA* being a black hole. We treat theory and observations in the framework of the philosophical discussions about “realism and underdetermination”, as this line of arguments allows us to describe the situation in observational astrophysics with respect to supermassive black holes. Questions concerning the existence of supermassive black holes and in particular SgrA* are discussed using causation as an indispensable element. We show that the results of our investigation are convincingly mapped out by this combination of concepts.

This is a comment on a not so major point in Alexander Bird’s recent excellent monograph Knowing Science (2022). Bird argues in the first few chapters for the thesis that science aims at knowledge (rather than at truth, verisimilitude, understanding, or problem solving). That is a major point. I will not quibble with this thesis, but rather with the kind of arguments he relies on to establish it. I will discuss the question of how best to argue for or against the claim that X is the aim of science. If one sticks with what I take to be the only adequate source for knowledge about the aim of science, Bird’s suggestion that knowledge is the aim might need to be qualified.

This paper explores the relation between natural modality and our modelling practices. It will be argued that some modelling practices such as abstraction and idealization should be understood as presupposing empirical claims about objective modal features of the behavior of target systems. To establish the connection between natural modality on the one hand and modelling practices on the other an analysis of natural modality in terms of empirically accessible invariance relations will be provided.

Inductive Metaphysics (IM) is a comparatively new branch of metaphysics that justifies metaphysical principles by inductive or abductive inferences from empirical evidence, rather than by purely logico-conceptual considerations. This is the first volume to provide a representative picture of current research and debates in this branch of metaphysics. Metaphysics was traditionally conceived as a purely conceptual, a priori enterprise. Besides the traditional view, there has always been the opposite view of metaphysics as an a posteriori discipline, but it was not until the 19th century that an a posteriori understanding of metaphysics was turned into a philosophical program entitled "Inductive Metaphysics". The program of IM argues that premises in metaphysical arguments should rely on empirical data and that inductive and abductive inferences are legitimate methods in metaphysics. This volume explores IM as a continuously expanding and highly topical field of metaphysics with contributions in virtually all domains of the discipline. The chapters are divided into six thematic sections. It starts with a section on the increasing role of IM in the history of philosophy and in contemporary philosophy. The next section addresses the central role of the method of abduction for IM, followed by a section on the relation of IM to metaphysical accounts of grounding, explanation, and evidence, and a section on IM and the formation of concepts. The last two sections cover the applications of IM in physics and in the life sciences.

An important question for the causal modeling approach is how to integrate non‐causal dependence relations such as asymmetric supervenience into the approach. The most prominent proposal to that effect (due to Gebharter) is to treat those dependence relationships as formally analogous to causal relationships. We argue that this proposal neglects some crucial differences between causal and non‐causal dependencies, and that in the context of causal modeling non‐causal dependence relationships should be represented as mutual dependence relationships. We develop a new kind of model – “hybrid models” ‐ based on this suggestion, and formulate a set of axioms for those models. Our formalism has important implications for Kim's exclusion problem: whereas Gebharter's framework vindicates Kim's causal exclusion objection against nonreductive physicalism, our framework has no such implication, and can help non‐reductive physicalists vindicate the efficacy of high‐level properties. A further benefit of our formalism is that it yields a natural and plausible way of thinking about interventions in multi‐level contexts.

Let us assume that human behavior is subject to laws of nature. These are either deterministic or indeterministic. Prima facie in both cases our behavior appears to be excused. For it seems as if, in the case of deterministic laws, we cannot behave differently than we actually do. In the case of indeterministic laws, it seems as if we are not the originators of this behavior, because how we behave depends on chance. There is a tension between the scientific characterization of the world on the one hand and the characterization of people who are responsible for their behaviour on the other. The book examines how the answer to the question of whether people are responsible for their behavior depends on what is meant by determinism, causality, laws of nature and (perhaps somewhat surprisingly) reduction.

Causal Bayes nets (CBNs) provide one of the most powerful tools for modelling coarse-grained type-level causal structure. As in other fields (e.g., thermodynamics) the question arises how such coarse-grained characterisations are related to the characterisation of their underlying structure (in this case: token-level causal relations). Answering this question meets what is called a “coherence-requirement” in the reduction debate: How are different accounts of one and the same system (or kind of system) related to each other. We argue that CBNs as tools for type-level causal inference are abstract enough to roughly fit any current token-level theory of causation as long as certain modelling assumptions are satisfied, but accounts of actual causation, i.e. accounts that attempt to infer token-causation based on CBNs, for the very same reason, face certain limitations.

In some German-language contributions to the debate on free will, it is assumed or claimed that determinism is not an empirically verifiable thesis. Peter Bieri, for example, thinks that one must presuppose determinism in order to understand the world as a conceivable world. Determinism would then not be an empirical thesis, but rather a condition without which the conceivability of the world cannot be thought (Bieri 2001, 15/16). Geert Keil writes that determinism "can neither be verified nor falsified experimentally and therefore determinism [is] a metaphysical thesis, not a scientific one" (Keil 2018, 58). In contrast to these two claims, I will argue that determinism is most usefully conceived as an empirical thesis whose verification faces many difficulties. These difficulties, however, are not fundamentally different from those faced by other empirical theses.

In this paper we distinguish two issues that are often run together in discussions about physicalism. The first issue concerns levels. How do entities picked out by non-physical terminology, such as biological or psychological terminology, relate to physical entities? Are the former identical to, or metaphysically supervenient on, the latter? The second issue concerns physical parts and wholes. How do macroscopic physical entities relate to their microscopic parts? Are the former generally determined by the latter? We argue that views on these two issues are independent of one another and should not be conflated.

Humeans about laws maintain that laws of nature are nothing over and above the complete distribution of non-modal, categorical properties in spacetime. ‘Humean compatibilists’ argue that if Humeanism about laws is true, then agents in a deterministic world can do otherwise than they are lawfully determined to do because of the distinctive nature of Humean laws. More specifically, they reject a central premise of the Consequence argument by maintaining that deterministic laws of nature are ‘up to us’. In this paper, we present a new argument for Humean compatibilism. We argue that Humeans about laws indeed have resources for defending compatibilism that non-Humeans lack. Moreover, we show that utilizing these resources does not lead to objectionable consequences. Humeans about laws should thus embrace Humean compatibilism.

In a recently published article A. Nordmann highlighted the fact that Hertz considered it as the greatest pleasure of scientific research to be “alone with nature” and to learn “directly from nature” (see Nordmann, 1998, p. 156). Hertz contrasts this being on his own with nature with the “disputes about human opinions views and demands. (see Nordmann, 1998, p. 156) . It is this contrast between nature on the one hand and human beliefs etc. on the other that is fundamental for his central epistemological pursuit: the attempt to sort out which features of our theories can be attributed to nature as opposed to those which depend on us. I will discuss the various writings in which Hertz touches this subject.

The inapplicability of variations on theory reduction in the context of genetics and their irrelevance to ongoing research has led to an anti-reductionist consensus in philosophy of biology. One response to this situation is to focus on forms of reductive explanation that better correspond to actual scientific reasoning (e.g. part–whole relations). Working from this perspective, we explore three different aspects (intrinsicality, fundamentality, and temporality) that arise from distinct facets of reductive explanation: composition and causation. Concentrating on these aspects generates new forms of reductive explanation and conditions for their success or failure in biology and other sciences. This analysis is illustrated using the case of protein folding in molecular biology, which demonstrates its applicability and relevance, as well as illuminating the complexity of reductive reasoning in a specific biological context