Episode 17: Brandon Fogel discusses mechanism and causation
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What is action at a distance and why does it matter in physics?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Mark Hopwood.
With us today is Brandon Fogel, Harper Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and he's here to talk with us about mechanism and causation. Brendan Fogel, welcome.
Hello, Matt. And Mark.
So you've been especially interested in the idea of action at a distance in the history of physics. So maybe you could tell us what that is.
So, um historically the term action at a distance has been used to refer to the way that certain kinds of forces have been understood to transmit their effects. So specifically gravity and the electric force and magnetic force. But more more generally it it has to do with the idea that something that happens in one place can cause an effect in another place without anything traveling from one to the other. So it's an action that uh That affects something in one place, but that began at a distance.
So yeah, the idea would be that something can happen in this side of the room and affect something on the other side of the room without coming into contact with anything in between this side of the room and that side of the room or something roughly to that effect.
Yeah, that's right. So without anything uh passing from one to the other. A better way to understand the concept is to think about how you perceive actions happening in the world around you. So when you see things happen, you often come up with a way of explaining them that involves things that we would call mechanisms. So objects banging into one another and transmitting their emotions through direct contact. And you you almost never use uh kinds of explanations that don't involve that. And so uh Now think about what happens, for example, when you see a magic trick. Uh I have a magic trick that I like to do that uh involves uh a playing card uh that it has put in my hand and uh I lay a match on top of it and I'm able to make the match appear to levitate, uh to actually rise off the card about about half an inch or so and then it falls back down and I can do that on command.
And uh you can ask yourself, what sorts of explanations could I give for how I'm able to match? So you can ask yourself, so what sort of explanations you can give for how I'm able to make the match levitate? And uh some of those are gonna be better than others. One option, one possibility is that I actually have the power of levitation. I can make things levitate with my mind. And uh you can stop there, maybe, and maybe that suffices as an explanation. Uh so I could ask you guys actually, does that do you find that a satisfactory explanation?
I mean I guess I love it as an explanation because I love magic tricks, but I suppose part of what I love about it is that it can't be true, right? It it seems to me like it can't be true. There's gonna have to be some other explanation. And maybe I don't want to know if I'm just enjoying a magic show, but somewhere deep down I assume there's another explanation. It's not going to have to do with the powers of your mind. It's going to have to do with something, like you said, in contact with the magic stick.
So cool. So what I mean what's really unsatisfying about Brandon can levitate things? I mean why honestly, why is that unsatisfying?
Well, I mean one reason you might find it unsatisfying is that it's difficult to generalize. It seems like it's tailored to the particular moment right now. It doesn't really furnish us with explanations of any other phenomena beyond this particular instance of your levitating a matchstick. It doesn't make further predictions about how things work.
Okay. Well i is that just another way of saying that you're not um you don't seem to see levitation phenomena happening a lot. Right, right. Okay. So if I started making other things move around me, you would then start to believe that I had the power of levitation?
I mean I guess it seems hard to say, but at a certain point
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is action at a distance and why does it matter in physics?
0:19–9:03
2
How does Brandon illustrate action at a distance with a levitating match trick?
9:03–17:18
3
Why do explanations that rely on ‘brute‑force’ powers feel unsatisfying?
17:18–22:40
4
How did historical figures like Newton, Leibniz, and Parmenides view action at a distance?
22:40–29:03
5
What role did the mechanistic philosophy and the field concept play in resolving action‑at‑a‑distance debates?
29:03–31:01
6
How does the principle of sufficient reason connect to explanations of distant causation?
31:01–33:46
Speakers
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