Was sollen wir tun? Was dürfen wir glauben? - bei DuEPublico ...

164 RÖHL
1.3 Options for Avoiding the Conflict
There seem to be several options to avoid or mitigate the conflict. I will briefly look at the two
most obvious ones: Reductionism and Pluralism. One could subscribe to hard physicalist
reductionism and conclude that causal descriptions in the macroscopic realm and the special
sciences should not be taken ontologically serious, but only as some kind of approximate
description. Event causation is not really real, neither are the entities of higher levels. Both
are epiphenomena, supervening on the basic physical entities and everything could in
principle be reduced to fundamental levels without event causation. This is a viable position,
although the attempts of reductionism in the last decades do not bode all that well and major
philosophical accounts of reduction or supervenience are actually spelled out in the event
causation approach. Another point is that there is no exact alignment between ontic levels
and the possibility of a description in terms of continuous time evolution. Microscopic
bacteria are not described by a mathematical theory, but mesoscopic steam engines and
macroscopic solar systems are.
The other option is some kind of ontological pluralism along the lines proposed by Nancy
Cartwright: The world is “dappled”; its regions and levels are strongly independent with
respective “regional” ontologies and laws (Cartwright 1999). Accordingly, a similar pluralism
could hold with respect to the causal relation and we could have event causation in some
regions and continuous time evolution in others. But even with such a notion of strongly
independent levels of reality it would seem really odd to have wildly dissimilar causal
relations on different (vertical) levels (or no causation worth speaking of at all on some levels,
but not on others). This seems especially problematic if causation is taken to be the “glue”
between somewhat self-consistent, (horizontally) independent patches of reality. Especially
for a “dappled world” like Cartwright's not to fall apart, we need a non-domain-specific
account of causation as the relation that stitches the patches together. If one takes domains
only vertically as levels dependent on the respective lower levels one could use relations of
“constitution” between them that might be indepedent of causation. But the thorny problems
of supervenience and the possibility of downward/upward causation need not concern me
here. In any case it seems clear that accepting fundamentally different notions of causation in
different domains or levels of reality will be a problem for a unified scientific world view.
So I will try a different approach beyond reductionism or pluralism. To this end, it is
important to note that it is far from obvious what the ontological implications of the standard
mathematical description should be and there is the chance of reconciliation of the conflicting
views. Which relation do models like a high-dimensional phase space bear to reality which
takes place in ordinary spacetime? Do all terms of the formalism correspond to entities of the
world and to which kinds of entities? My aim is to show that a picture of the world in which
causal powers or dispositions play a central part and are the basis of causation and laws of
nature (defended by e.g. Ellis/Lierse 1994, Molnar 2003, Bird 2007) is able to accommodate
both the view of mathematical physics and the one of manifestly causal descriptions. For this
purpose I will offer one general argument examining the presuppositions of the continous
time evolution approach and mention two examples from classical and quantum physics for
the central role of causal dispositions in these fields. But first it will be shown how the event
causation approach can be spelled out in terms of dispositions and their manifestations.
2. Dispositions and Event-causation
2.1 Dispositions, Manifestations, Triggers
Without going into details I will first state the main points of my conception of dispositions.
Compared with accounts in the literature it is probably closest to the one defended by Brian
Ellis in (Ellis/Lierse 1994) and (Ellis 2001), but I take it to be also compatible with the slightly