Edoardo Fazzini
University of Bern
“Baumgartner(3) is critical on Woodward interventionist account(7,8) in mental causation, stating that upper-level properties are impossible to be proved causally efficacious. Given the nature of the supervenience relation between high-level mental properties and their low-level physical bases, any intervention on the mental level also alters the physical one. Hence, interventions are fat-handed(2), in that they fail to isolate mental variables from their nondescendants.
This presentation focuses on fat-handed interventions, demonstrating an implicit consequence of Baumgartner’s thesis. According to Baumgartner, the necessary co-variation of mental properties on the physical ones implies a multi-level causation issue: the impossibility of independent interventions on macro-properties that non-reductively supervene on micro-properties(1).
However, I claim that fat-handedness is not a drawback of interventionism; rather, it indicates the limits of its application domain. To illustrate this, I introduce a multi-level physical causation case: Rayleigh–Bénard convection. According to it, the outcome of heating fluid from below results in convection rolls— macroscopic cell-like patterns emerging under specific thermal boundary conditions(5). Once formed, these patterns constrain the motion of individual fluid particles. I analyze this case by demonstrating that it ends up in diachronic downward causation, mirroring a similar structure to the causal exclusion problem outlined by Kim in the context of mental causation(4). Although interventionism implies that the high level is causally efficacious in both cases, this inference is empirically measured only in the physical scenario. On the mental level, with no evidence whatsoever of how mental properties interact with their bases, epiphenomenalism remains an equally compatible reading. In conclusion, fat-handed interventions reveal that sound causal inferences involving non-reductive supervenience relations rely upon background metaphysical assumptions about the nature of causation in scientific practice. All that stresses the need for a naturalized metaphysics(6) of interventionism, which currently implies excluding mental causation.
References
[1] Baumgartner, Michael (2010). Interventionism and Epiphenomenalsim. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (3):359-383.
[2] Baumgartner, Michael & Gebharter, Alexander (2016). Constitutive Relevance, Mutualì Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3):731-756.
[3] Baumgartner, Michael (2018). The Inherent Empirical Underdetermination of Mental Causation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2):335-350.
[4] Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[5] Kirchhoff, Michael & Kiverstein, Julian (2024). Diachronic Constitution. Manuscrito 47 (1):2022-0042.
[6] Ladyman, J., & Ross, D. (2007). Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized. Oxford University Press.
[7] Woodward, James. (2003). Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation. New York: Oxford University Press.
[8] Woodward, James (2015). Interventionism and Causal Exclusion. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (2):303-347.”
Chair: Celine Lechaux
Time: 04 September, 11:20 – 11:50
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 