Mebius, Alexander (2013) Causation by absence in mechanistic explanation. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Many contemporary debates on the nature of mechanisms centre on the issue of modulating negative causes. One type of negative causability, which I will refer to here as causation by absence, appears to be difficult to incorporate into modern accounts of mechanistic explanation. This paper argues that a recent attempt to solve this problem, proposed by Benjamin Barros, needs to be improved since it overlooks the fact that not all absences qualify as sources of mechanism failure. Instead, I maintain, that there is a number of additional types of effects caused by absences that need to be incorporated in order to account for the diversity of causal connections in the biological sciences. My aim is to provide means for incorporation without compromising the mechanistic notion of causal productivity.

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