Holly K. Andersen

This chapter introduces the volume, highlighting key themes and programmatic features of a pragmatist approach to topics in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Pragmatism is a potent tool at the interface between methodological and applied questions arising from scientific practice, and the underlying ontological or metaphysical commitments that are implied by or frame those questions. For topics at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, pragmatism is an effective way to take entrenched debates and re-frame them in ways that challenge old dichotomies and offer more fruitful paths forward. Pragmatist approaches here involve the inextricability of methodological or epistemological commitments with more fundamental or metaphysical questions. Many traditional dichotomies such as realism versus antirealism, truth versus idealization, unification versus disunity, are challenged, and alternatives developed from a more holist and pragmatist perspective.

Drawing on historical episodes where new fields of science branch out of philosophy, I offer six distinctive developments involved in such episodes as a template that can be applied to the contemporary example of causation branching out of philosophy to become a new science. In a potted history of major developments in causation since the beginning of the 20th century, I illustrate how these developments occurred in important points in the ongoing discussion around causation. I conclude by giving a general characterization of what it is that foundations do in any science, what they do in causation, and where the next steps are needed to finalize this process of launching causation as an independent science.

Apparently modally laden terms and relations figure in scientific models, especially though not only possibility. There is an old empiricist tension between measurements as returning actual values, and stronger forms of modality. How could we measure what didn't happen, or use measurement to distinguish what didn't happen but could have, from that which did not happen and could not have? I offer several pragmatist points in the context of modeling and possibility specifically, by which to see this tension as a fruitful one. Peirce offers a view of positive possibility, where it prior to and required for actuality, and which can be differentiated from merely in-principle possibility. He also offers a view of doubt where it requires one suspend use of a belief and initiate an inquiry; views of possibility like those in Humean accounts, even pragmatic Humean views, are offering what amounts to a doubt about models that do not represent these, and only represent positive possibilities. This leads to a distinction by Price between e-representation and irepresentation, where some representation is constrained externally by the environment, and some constrained internally by inferential connections. Putting these together provides a better way to understand how models can represent modality such as positive possibility, and how models can be used in ways that settle direction of fit.

Patterns and pattern ontologies are a powerful way for pragmatists to address metaphysical issues by rejecting a false dichotomy between pluralism and realism. However, there is a common misconception about patterns that I call the philosophically perverse patterns (PPP) problem. Here, critics of patterns invent perverse examples that meet the metaphysical criteria to count as patterns. I defuse this concern by showing how PPP misunderstands what the pragmatist metaphysics of patterns is supposed to accomplish: the bare definition should not rule out, or in, substantive examples of patterns that instead should involve methodological considerations. I use this response to the PPP problem to show how the metaphysical definition of 'pattern' allows the pragmatist to capture the rich intricacies of ontologies in the sciences and yields two illustrative norms by which methodology can be guided in developing or refining ontologies: cohesion and coherence.

Realist metaphysical views often rely, explicitly or implicitly, on variations of the presupposition that genuine structure is sparse; call this assumption Sparsity. This includes views where there is one uniquely correct way to carve up the world, and also apparently pluralistic views that allow more structure yet still add a limit so there is not ‘too’ much. This conflates the question of how to characterize what structure is, with two other questions: how much structure there is; and which particular structures there are. I draw on Dennettian patterns, combining deflationary realism with profligacy about real patterns, to demonstrate a pragmatist metaphysical approach to identifying structure without begging the question of how much structure there is. Pragmatist pattern metaphysics allows that the world may be dense in structure, beyond any presupposed particular upper bound from Sparsity. Finding genuine structure may be easy, and most of it reiterative, useless, or uninteresting; the world may be so dense with structure that we could never exhaust it, such that trying to find ‘the’ correct structure is in principle unachievable. This shifts the substantive task away from the metaphysical question of what structure is, and towards methodological considerations. If there may be more genuine structure than we could ever investigate, our interests as inquirers must play a role in narrowing down which structures we choose to investigate, and which of many closely related structures yields the most systematicity, usefulness, or other epistemic desiderata. This pragmatist approach is minimalist with respect to metaphysical commitment: saying some structure is genuine says very little of substance about it.

In this chapter, we identify four specific subtypes of epistemic injustice that target Indigenous knowledge systems, practices, products, and methods of transmission. These four subtypes of epistemic injustice are: cultural-methodological epistemic injustice, epistemic diminishment, epistemic cultural disruption, and epistemic biophysical disruption. These subtypes identify avenues for the framework of transformative justice targeting these epistemic injustices and their harms. We provide three case studies from the Salish Sea, in British Columbia, Canada, of epistemic transformative justice, described as responses to these subtypes of epistemic injustice. The first involves Indigenous archaeological work on marine resource use over long spans of history. The second involves a Squamish First Nation-led collaborative herring monitoring initiative. The third is about work on revitalizing Straits Salish reef net fishing technology.

Humean accounts of laws are often contrasted with governing accounts, and recent developments have added pragmatic versions of Humeanism. This article offers Mitchell’s pragmatist, perspectival account of laws as a third option. The differences between these accounts come down to the role of modality. Mitchell’s bottom-up account allows for subtle gradations of modal content to be conveyed by laws. The perspectival character of laws is not an accident or something to be eventually eliminated – it is part of how this modal content is conveyed. I conclude with a discussion of the metaphysical commitments in Humeanism as requiring a perspectiveless view of the manifold from outside, and how Mitchell’s situated account is better able to account for the substantive notion of possibility involved in scientific laws.

The two-times problem, where time as experienced seems to have distinctive features different than those found in fundamental physics, appears to be more intractable than necessary, I argue, because the two times are marked out from the positions furthest apart: neuroscience and physics. I offer causation as exactly the kind of bridge between these two times that authors like Buonomano and Rovelli (forthcoming) are seeking. It is a historical contingency from philosophical discussions around phenomenology, and a methodological artefact from neuroscience, that most studies of temporal features of experience require subjects to be sufficiently still that their engagement with affordances in the environment can be at best tested in artificial and highly constrained ways. Physics does not offer an account of causation, but accounts of causation are tied to or grounded in physics in ways that can be clearly delineated. Causation then serves as a bridge that coordinates time as experienced, via interaction with affordances in the environment, with time in physics as it constrains causal relationships. I conclude by showing how an information-theoretic account of causation fits neatly into and extends the information gathering and utilizing system (IGUS) of Gruber et al. (Front. Psychol., 13, 718505).

I argue for two main points in historiography of physics regarding the significance of Du Châtelet's Foundations of Physics in the development of mechanics. The first is that, despite Du Châtelet calling it a textbook in the Preface, it should not be understood as 'merely' a textbook. Instead, it fits in a tradition of women involved in natural philosophy in that era using liminal publication opportunities, and to reduce some of the resistance to their publication. Even these liminal opportunities were rare and mostly available to women of very high social standing and wealth, who also happened to have supportive families or spouses, and were usually associated with some other well-known male thinker. The second point is that, even if we treat Foundations as a textbook, the way in which it synthesizes and refines work by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, and others, meets the criteria given by Kuhn for the establishment of a first paradigm, which is not complete without such a definitive statement that enables the mop-up work characteristic of normal science. I conclude that by Kuhn's own criteria, he ought to have identified Du Châtelet as a key part of establishing the first paradigm in physics. She blazed a trail for others to follow.

Humean accounts of laws are often contrasted with governing accounts, and recent developments have added pragmatic versions of Humeanism. This paper offers Mitchell's pragmatist, perspectival account of laws as a third option. The differences between these accounts come down to the role of modality. Mitchell's bottom-up account allows for subtle gradations of modal content to be conveyed by laws. The perspectival character of laws is not an accident or something to be eventually eliminated - it is part of how this modal content is conveyed. I conclude with a discussion of the metaphysical commitments in Humeanism as requiring a perspectiveless view of the manifold from outside, and how Mitchell's situated account is better able to account for the substantive notion of possibility involved in scientific laws.

I highlight a metaphysical concern that stands in the way of more widespread adoption of causal modeling techniques such as causal Bayes nets. Researchers in some fields may resist adoption due to concerns that they don't 'really' understand what they are saying about a system when they apply such techniques. Students in these fields are repeated exhorted to be cautious about application of statistical techniques to their data without a clear understanding of the conditions required for those techniques to yield genuine insight into the data. They are acutely aware that anyone can chuck some data into a software package and get what looks like an answer, even though these tests may not be well-defined for the data on which they can apparently be run. This is thus a healthy skepticism for uptake of causal modeling methods, which points directly to the need for a metaphysical understanding of causation in order to successfully use the modeling methods. Without a clear understanding of what the methods are committing to, including what it means to say that there exists a causal relationship, researchers have limited ability to identify potentially bad output, or to independently verify results.

Given the technological constraints of long-duration space travel and planetary settlement, off-Earth humans will likely need to employ food systems very different from their terrestrial counterparts, and newly emerging food technologies are being developed that will shape novel food systems in these off-Earth contexts. Projected off-Earth food systems may therefore potentially “alienate” their users in new ways compared to Earth-based food systems. They will be susceptible to alienation in ways that are similar to such potential on Earth, where there are points of overlap between off-Earth food systems and any of the multitudes of ways in which food systems on Earth are structured. They will also be susceptible to new forms of alienation, as we encounter scenarios that are genuinely structurally novel to humanity. These are especially important to consider since there are comparatively fewer analyses of these food systems where they differ from existing ones. We propose five non-exhaustive sources of value beyond nutrition our individual relationships with a food may possess: gustatory, social, cultural, epistemic, and authorial value. Using these, we offer examples of ways in which an off-Earth food system may exacerbate or alleviate alienation for humans in long-term off-Earth food systems.

The reduction of grounding to causation, or each to a more general relation of which they are species, has sometimes been justified by the impressive inferential capacity of structural equation modelling, causal Bayes nets, and interventionist causal modelling. Many criticisms of this assimilation focus on how causation is inadequate for grounding. Here, I examine the other direction: how treating grounding in the image of causation makes the resulting view worse for causation. The distinctive features of causal modelling that make this connection appealing are distorted beyond use by forcing them to fit onto grounding. The very inferential strength that makes causation attractive is only possible because of a narrow construal of what counts as a causal relation; as soon as that broadens, the inferential capacity markedly diminishes. Making causation suitable for application to grounding spoils what was appealing about causation for this task in the first place. However, grounding need not appeal to causation: causal modelling does not have exclusive claim to structural equation modeling or other formal techniques of modelling structure. I offer a case in favour of a different kind of metaphysical frugality, which tend towards narrow, more restrictive construals of relations like causation or grounding, because then each relation behaves more homogenously. This more homogenous behavior delivers stronger inferential power per relation even though there may be more relations to which one is committed.

Even in areas of philosophy of science that don’t involve formal treatments of truth, one’s background view of truth still centrally shapes views on other issues. I offer an informal way to think about truth as trueing, like trueing a bicycle wheel. This holist approach to truth provides a way to discuss knowledge products like models in terms of how well-trued they are to their target. Trueing emphasizes: the process by which models are brought into true; how the idealizations in models are not false but rather like spokes in appropriate tension to achieve a better-trued fit to target; and that this process is not accomplished once and done forever, but instead requires upkeep and ongoing fine-tuning. I conclude by emphasizing the social importance of being a pragmatist about truth in order to accurately answer questions about science such as, “but do we really know that…”

Shadworth Hodgson offers an account of how philosophy relates to science - both physical and psychological - in which three different conceptions of time can be identified. He distinguishes the methods of philosophy, involving analysis of the contents of immediate consciousness, and of science, which presumes the existence of the world of common sense. Hodgson holds that philosophical analysis of immediate consciousness, or the analysis of a present moment in the experience, provides the ultimate justification for knowledge in science. Time as an object of study in science must be distinguished from the temporal structure of immediate consciousness. Time as a target of scientific study is thus differentiable into time in physical science, and time in psychology, where the temporal characteristics of consciousness can be studied, but only from a perspective external to that consciousness. Each of those scientific conceptions of time still presupposes and are evidentially dependent on the analysis of immediate consciousness, itself already temporal. The result is that time as a fundamental unit of experience could not, even in principle, conflict with time as studied in science, because it is presupposed by and the evidential base for claims about time in science.

This paper brings together Thompson's naive action explanation with interventionist modeling of causal structure to show how they work together to produce causal models that go beyond current modeling capabilities, when applied to specifically selected systems. By deploying well-justified assumptions about rationalization, we can strengthen existing causal modeling techniques' inferential power in cases where we take ourselves to be modeling causal systems that also involve actions. The internal connection between means and end exhibited in naive action explanation has a modal strength like that of distinctively mathematical explanation, rather than that of causal explanation. Because it is stronger than causation, it can be treated as if it were merely causal in a causal model without thereby overextending the justification it can provide for inferences. This chapter introduces and demonstrate the usage of the Rationalization condition in causal modeling, where it is apt for the system(s) being modeled, and to provide the basics for incorporating R variables into systems of variables and R arrows into DAGs. Use of the Rationalization condition supplements causal analysis with action analysis where it is apt.

Meta-laws, including conservation laws, are laws about the form of more specific, phenomenological, laws. Lange distinguishes between meta-laws as coincidences, where the meta-law happens to hold because the more specific laws hold, and meta-laws as constraints to which subsumed laws must conform. He defends this distinction as a genuine metaphysical possibility, such that metaphysics alone ought not to rule one way or another, leaving it an open question for physics. Lange’s distinction marks a genuine difference in how a given meta-law can be used in explanations. Yet, I argue, it is not simply an empirical matter as to whether a given conservation law is a constraint or a coincidence. There is no set matter of fact about the world that determines this, and physics alone will not be able to return a determinate verdict on a law-by-law basis, even while there is a genuine difference between any given law as constraint and as coincidence. Rather, the difference marks different ways of treating the same law in a theoretical setting: by shifting the explanatory context, treating the same law as part of a different mathematical structure, it can be a genuine constraint and a genuine coincidence. The difference between constraint and coincidence relates to the way in which we use a law in specific theoretical and explanatory settings. Because the same law can appear in multiple contexts, it can be used in these genuinely different ways, without itself ‘‘really’’ being either one or the other as some atomistic empirical fact. Conservation laws as constraints and conservation laws as coincidences are both genuine theoretical roles that the same law can play. I conclude by considering how this pragmatist construal of constraints versus coincidences reveals how two parts of Lange’s work in this section of the book are unexpectedly independent of one another.

This paper articulates an account of causation as a collection of information-theoretic relationships between patterns instantiated in the causal nexus. I draw on Dennett’s account of real patterns to characterize potential causal relata as patterns with specific identification criteria and noise tolerance levels, and actual causal relata as those patterns instantiated at some spatiotemporal location in the rich causal nexus as originally developed by Salmon. I develop a representation framework using phase space to precisely characterize causal relata, including their degree of counterfactual robustness, causal profiles, causal connectivity, and privileged grain size. By doing so, I show how the philosophical notion of causation can be rendered in a format that is amenable for direct application of mathematical techniques from information theory such that the resulting informational measures are causal informational measures. This account provides a metaphysics of causation that supports interventionist semantics and causal modeling and discovery techniques.

I present three reasons why philosophers of science should be more concerned about violations of causal faithfulness (CF). In complex evolved systems, mechanisms for maintaining various equilibrium states are highly likely to violate CF. Even when such systems do not precisely violate CF, they may nevertheless generate precisely the same problems for inferring causal structure from probabilistic relationships in data as do genuine CF-violations. Thus, potential CF-violations are particularly germane to experimental science when we rely on probabilistic information to uncover the DAG, rather than already knowing the DAG from which we could predict the right experiments to ‘catch out’ the hidden causal relationships.

A finer-grained delineation of a given explanandum reveals a nexus of closely related causal and non- causal explanations, complementing one another in ways that yield further explanatory traction on the phenomenon in question. By taking a narrower construal of what counts as a causal explanation, a new class of distinctively mathematical explanations pops into focus; Lange’s characterization of distinctively mathematical explanations can be extended to cover these. This new class of distinctively mathematical explanations is illustrated with the Lotka-Volterra equations. There are at least two distinct ways those equations might hold of a system, one of which yields straightforwardly causal explanations, but the other of which yields explanations that are distinctively mathematical in terms of nomological strength. In the first, one first picks out a system or class of systems, finds that the equations hold in a causal -explanatory way; in the second, one starts with the equations and explanations that must apply to any system of which the equations hold, and only then turns to the world to see of what, if any, systems it does in fact hold. Using this new way in which a model might hold of a system, I highlight four specific avenues by which causal and non- causal explanations can complement one another.

This chapter examines the relationship between laws and mechanisms as approaches to characterising generalizations and explanations in science. I give an overview of recent historical discussions where laws failed to satisfy stringent logical criteria, opening the way for mechanisms to be investigated as a way to explain regularities in nature. This followed by a critical discussion of contemporary debates about the role of laws versus mechanisms in describing versus explaining regularities. I conclude by offering new arguments for two roles for laws that mechanisms cannot subsume, one epistemically optimistic and one pessimistic, both broadly Humean. Do note that this piece is not primarily Hume exegesis; it is more of a riff in the key of Hume.