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An Abductive Theory of Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Baumgartner  and
Lorenzo Casini
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Abstract

The first part of this article finds Craver’s mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of ideal experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation for this fact is the existence of an additional dependence relation, namely, constitution. NDC has important ramifications for constitutional discovery—most notably, that there is no experimentum crucis for constitution, not even under ideal discovery circumstances.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 214 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

We thank the audiences of the annual conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Manchester, July 2–3, 2015, and of the European Society for the Philosophy of Science, Düsseldorf, September 23–26, 2015. We are especially grateful to Beate Krickel for very helpful comments and discussions and to three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of the article. This research was generously supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant PP00P1_144736/1 for Baumgartner and grants CRSII 1_147685/1 and 100012E_160866/1 for Casini.

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