Title Pending 5258

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The role of reciprocal causation in Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is controversial. On the one hand, reciprocal causation is considered a key innovation of EES, thereby justifying EES's existence. On the other, EES skeptics argue that Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET) already sufficiently accounts for reciprocal causation. Two arguments support criticisms directed at the role of reciprocal causation in EES. First, the misrepresentation argument claims that EES proponents mischaracterize causal notions in SET. Second, the empirical argument provides concrete examples of how reciprocal causation is well-acknowledged in SET's traditional evolutionary explanations. Neither argument has generated constructive debate surrounding the role of reciprocal causation in evolutionary explanations. In this paper, I propose a third argument—the scope argument—which analyzes reciprocal causation in terms of timescales and grain of explanations. The scope argument reframes the debate in two ways. First, reframing the debate in terms of scope clarifies the role of reciprocal causation by allowing research programs to specify targets of explanation. Second, the elements of scope (timescales and grain) elucidate the epistemic advantage of reciprocal causation in the respective research programs in question.