Beyond Causal Exclusion

Workshop Multi-level Causal Models and the Proportionality Constraint

November 6-7, 2025,

University of Bern, Mittelstrasse 43, room 216

Organizers:

Edoardo Fazzini: edoardo.fazzini@unibe.ch

Vera Hoffmann-Kolss: vera.hoffmann-kolss@unibe.ch

Schedule

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Morning Session: 09:00 – 12:45

Speakers: Marcel Weber, Andreas Hüttemann, Samuel Lee

09:00 – 09:15             Welcome

09:15 – 10:15         

 Marcel Weber (University of Geneva): Abstraction, Proportionality, and the Gene Concept

10:15 – 10:30          Coffee Break

10:30 – 11:30             

Andreas Hüttemann (University of Cologne): Levels, Causation and Proportionality

11:30 – 11:45             Coffee Break

11:45 – 12:45             

Samuel Lee (University of Hamburg): What Goldilocks Got Wrong

12:45 – 14:00             Lunch (Buffet)

Afternoon Session: 14:00 – 17:30

Speakers: Thomas Blanchard, Jan Sprenger, Zee Perry

14:00 – 15:00             

Thomas Blanchard (University of

Bordeaux Montaigne): Two Accounts of Proportionality

15:00 – 15:15             Coffee Break

15:15 – 16:15            

 Jan Sprenger (University of Turin): Counterfactuals: Truth Conditions, Probability and Acceptance

16:15 – 16:30             Coffee Break

16:30 – 17:30            

 Zee Perry (University of Birmingham): Realization, Additivity, and Causal Structure

19.00                         Dinner

Friday, November 7, 2025

Morning Session: 09:30 – 13:00

Speakers: Jennifer McDonald, Brian Ortmann, Brad Weslake

09:30 – 10:30             

Jennifer McDonald (Columbia University): What a Variable Presupposes and What Makes for Distinctness

10:30 – 10:45          Coffee Break

10:45 – 11:45             

Brian Ortmann (University of Hamburg): Spurious High-Level Causes Versus Genuine High-Level Causes

11:45 – 12:00             Coffee Break

12:00 – 13:00            

 Brad Weslake (NYU Shanghai): A Puzzle About High-Level Causation

13.00                         Lunch  

Abstracts

Thomas Blanchard: Two Accounts of Proportionality

In this talk, I will compare two influential accounts of proportionality. The first, due to List and Menzies, understands proportionality in terms of counterfactual dependence. The second, which traces back to Yablo, defines proportionality in terms of conditional irrelevance. In the first part of the talk, I will argue that Yablo’s account is superior in an important way to List and Menzies’s account, at least if we wish to use proportionality to defend and explain the autonomy of special science explanations. This is because in a range of cases where the high-level cause is supposed to be autonomous with respect to its lower-level realizer, only Yablo’s account yields the result that the high-level cause is more proportional to its effect than the lower-level realizer is. Nevertheless, Yablo’s account has an important downside compared to List and Menzies’s account, as I will argue in the second part of the talk: it is at odds with current frameworks for multi-level causal modelling. Specifically, when we try to implement Yablo’s account within those frameworks, the contention that proportionality is necessary for causation seems rather ad hoc. Thus, both accounts of proportionality face important issues.

Andreas Hüttemann: Levels, Causation and Proportionality

In this paper I will explore some concepts of levels and suggest that some accounts may motivate why proportionality is a reasonable constraint in some cases.

Samuel Lee: What Goldilocks Got Wrong

Proportionality or ‘Goldilocks’ principles, according to which causal explanations should have the right granularity of detail with respect to their explananda, are known to face intuitive counterexamples. I throw some more into the mix and argue that, taken together, the two sets of counterexamples reveal not only that Goldilocks principles are false, but that they are seriously misguided for deep structural reasons. In their stead, I suggest a different way to account for the same data that proportionality was meant to shed light on, based on the novel notion of explanatory distance. In particular, I show how our explanatory preferences around how granular a cause is with respect to its effect can be modelled as a species of preference about how distant a cause is from its effect, and that these proximity preferences can be justified by reference to core functional roles of the causal relation.

Jennifer McDonald: What a Variable Presupposes and What Makes for Distinctness

Causal relata are in some sense distinct, or independent from each other. This is predominately what distinguishes causal dependence from other kinds of metaphysical dependence – such as those underwritten by identity, persistence, mereological relations, functional realization, set membership, relations between determinables and their  determinates, etc. This distinctness requirement is most commonly met in extant causal analyses by negative stipulation: c and e are ‘distinct’ just in case they do not stand in any such metaphysical dependence relations. Yet this leaves the analysis of causation incomplete without a corresponding analysis of each such metaphysical relation. Alternatively, an analysis might invoke Lewis’s notion of event implication: c and e are ‘distinct’ just in case neither implies the other – where implication is defined mereologically over possible worlds (in whatever region the one occurs, the other also occurs). As I argue, however, spatiotemporal co-location proves insufficient. Instead, I propose an account of when c and e are distinct that relies on an ontic notion of presupposition, which I articulate. First, call one fact or event a ‘presupposition’ of a second event whenever any world in which the second or its negation occurs (aka. any of its alternatives), the first also occurs. Then, c is a ‘precondition’ of e just in case c implies e (in Lewis’s sense), c is a   presupposition of e, or e is implied by the conjunction of c and one of c’s presuppositions. Finally, c and e are distinct so long as neither is a precondition of the other.

Brian Ortmann: Spurious High-Level Causes Versus Genuine High-Level Causes

Baumgartner (2009) argues that Woodward’s (2004) promising interventionist theory is incompatible with the causal efficacy of high-level causes. In response, Woodward (2015) offers a revised version of his theory that admits high-level causes. However, based on a series of examples, I will show that Woodward’s updated account fails to draw an adequate distinction between spurious and genuine high-level causes. One might object that cases of spurious high-level causation are simply instances in which high-level causes are lessproportional than their realizers. I will argue, by contrast, that Woodward’s original interventionist theory, together with some plausible assumptions about high-level causes and their low-level realizers, reveals a substantial difference between spurious and genuine  causes. This difference helps illuminate how high-level and downward causation can be possible despite Kim’s (1998) exclusion problem.

Jan Sprenger: Counterfactuals: Truth Conditions, Probability and Acceptance

Causation and counterfactuals are closely related: analyses of causation make use of counterfactual reasoning, and causal modeling semantics is one of the most popular analyses of counterfactuals. This talk aims at an integrated account of truth conditions, probability and justified acceptance of counterfactuals, and specifically, at unifying causal modeling and minimal change semantics. The basic idea is that truth conditions are an abstract semantic device: they are not directly tested against semantic judgments, but determine the probability of a sentence, and via probabilistic acceptance conditions, they generate predictions about the semantic judgments of ordinary speakers. To obtain this picture, it is necessary to adopt a causal modeling interpretation of counterfactuals, or equivalently, a Stalnakerian selection function. Notably, Lewis-style truth conditions for counterfactuals that quantify over multiple scenarios can be interpreted as describing their acceptance conditions.

Marcel Weber: Abstraction, Proportionality, and the Gene Concept

Multi-level causation has always been on the minds of philosophers of biology because promises a resolution of the old conundrum of the autonomy of the biological sciences in a physical world. However, it is only since the elaboration of the interventionist approach to causality that the latter issue has been explicitly framed in causal terms (Woodward 2010, Ross 2020). In this talk, I use considerations about multi-level causation and proportionality in order to advance on a conceptual issue in molecular genetics, namely the role of abstraction and the question of the eliminability of the molecular gene concept. I will focus on the molecular gene concept that conceives genes structurally and functionally as DNA sequences that are templates or difference-makers for the linear sequence of biomolecules. The explanatory value of this concept has been disputed by gene eliminativists, for instance, by claiming that molecular genes should be thought of as “interesting regions of nucleic acid” (Kitcher 1992) or “things you can do with your genome” (Griffiths and Stotz 2006), thus suggesting that there is nothing that genes have in common at the structural and functional level. I argue contra gene eliminativists that, in spite of all the known complications with gene regulation and RNA editing, molecular genes in the mixed structural-functional sense are proportional difference-making causes for proteinsequences, taking into account the indexical character of the molecular gene concept (Waters 2018). In other words, this concept is marked by an abstraction that strikes a good balance between the depth and the scope of the explanations it provides.

Brad Weslake: A Puzzle About High-Level Causation

In this paper, I present a puzzle concerning high-level causation. The puzzle is related to but distinct from the exclusion argument. In the exclusion argument, the puzzle concerns how properties that are distinct from, but metaphysically necessitated by, the causes of an effect can themselves be causes of the effect. The puzzle with which this paper is concerned, by contrast, involves properties that are distinct from, but metaphysically necessitated by, the causes of an effect together with other non-causes of the effect. The paper has two main aims. The first is to clearly present the puzzle, and to show that it is a general puzzle about causation rather than a puzzle for any particular theory of causation. The second is to present a new solution.

Zee Perry: Realization, Additivity, and Causal Structure

Our explanations in the special sciences depend on, among other things, attribution of causal relations between higher-level entities. Can we make sense of these attributions in a way that respects the ways that these higher-level entities are realized by our fundamental physics? A complete model of these causal structures will include the multi-level grounding relations through which higher-level composite entities inherit their properties from the properties and relations of their more fundamental parts. 

This paper focuses on one of the simplest cases, the additivity of mass. I outline the standard account of how the masses of mereological composites are grounded by the more fundamental mass-facts. I then describe how the causal and explanatory profile of the standard account mirrors some of the most puzzling characteristics of multi-level causal systems, and examine how well principles like proportionality and exclusion work when applied to these cases. I will then look at analogues in higher-level causal models which exhibit a similar causal and explanatory structure, and examine how my preferred solution to these puzzles at the fundamental level squares up against them.