An enabling constraint is a Constraint that creates alternatives:
constraints not only reduce the alternatives - they also create alternatives. Constraints, that is, can also create properties which a component exhibits in virtue of its embeddedness in a system, properties it would otherwise not have.Juarrero (1998), 234
But constraints also bias a constrained object towards reaching points and trajectories in the state space that would otherwise have been practically impossible or vanishingly unlikely.Winning & Bechtel (2018), 293
References
- Juarrero (1998): “Causality as Constraint”
- Winning & Bechtel (2018): “Rethinking Causality in Biological and Neural Mechanisms: Constraints and Control”