Lessons from Causal Exclusion1

2002

In his recent book, Jaegwon Kim argues that psychophysical supervenience without psychophysical reduction renders mental causation 'unintelligible'. He also claims that, contrary to popular opinion, his argument against supervenient mental causation cannot be generalized so as to threaten the causal efficacy of other 'higher-level' properties: e.g., the properties of special sciences like biology. In this paper, I argue that none of the considerations Kim advances are sufficient to keep the supervenience argument from generalizing to all higherlevel properties, and that Kim's position in fact entails that only the properties of fundamental physical particles are causally efficacious. In his recent book Mind in a Physical World, Jaegwon Kim argues for two controversial and (if true) important claims. The first is that psychophysical supervenience without psychophysical reduction would render mental causation 'unintelligible'-that mental properties, if supervenient, would have their causal efficacy usurped by the very properties on which they supervene. (That is the conclusion of the so-called supervenience argument.) The second claim is that, contrary to popular opinion, the argument for the first claim cannot be generalized so as to threaten the causal efficacy of other 'higher-level' properties: e.g., the properties of special sciences like biology. In this paper, I take issue with the second of these claims. Specifically, I will argue that none of the considerations Kim advances are sufficient to keep the supervenience argument from generalizing to all higher-level properties, and that Kim's position in fact entails that only the properties of fundamental physical particles are causally efficacious. Before I argue this point, however, some background is in order.

In Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell., 2011

This short paper is a "quick and dirty" introduction for non-philosophers (with some background in propositional logic) to Jaegwon Kim's famous supervenience argument against non-reductive physicalism (also known as the exclusion problem). It motivates the problem of mental causation, introduces Kim's formulation of the issue centered around mind-body supervenience, presents the argument in deductive form, and makes explicit why Kim concludes that vindicating mental causation demands a reduction of mind.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1984

Synthese, 2024

Mental causation is notoriously threatened by the causal exclusion argument. A prominent strategy to save mental causation from causal exclusion consists in subscribing to an interventionist account of causation. This move has, however, recently been challenged by several authors. In this paper, we do two things: We (i) develop what we consider to be the strongest version of the interventionist causal exclusion argument currently on the market and (ii) propose a new way how it can in principle be overcome. In particular, we propose to replace strict supervenience in the assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical by probabilistic supervenience and show how this move has the potential to license the inference to mental causation. Finally, we argue that probabilistic supervenience captures some of the most important intuitions that strict supervenience captures and discuss possible objections to weakening strict supervenience in the way we suggest. Citation information: Gebharter, A., & Sekatskaya, M. (2024). Mental causation, interventionism, and probabilistic supervenience. Synthese, 203, 206. doi:10.1007/s11229-024-04608-w

European Journal of Philosophy, 2010

Abstract: I offer a novel objection to Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience Argument. I argue that the Supervenience Argument relies upon an untenable conception of the base physical properties upon which mental properties are supposed to supervene: the base properties are required to be both ordinary physical/causal properties and also unconditionally sufficient for the properties that they subvene. But these requirements are mutually exclusive; as a result, at least two premises in the Supervenience Argument are false. I argue that this has disruptive consequences both for the reductive position that Kim defends and the non-reductive position that he attacks. Neither side in the debate over the status of functionally conceived mental properties comes out unscathed.

2021

In a series of recent papers, Cynthia MacDonald and Graham MacDonald offer a resolution to the twin problems of mental causation and mental causal relevance. They argue that the problem of mental causation is soluble via token monism— mental events are causally efficacious physical events. At the same time, the problem of mental causal relevance is solved by combining this causally efficacious mental property instance with the systematic co-variation between distinct mental properties of the cause and the action-theoretic properties of the effect in question. In other words, their model is an instance of the familiar strategy of yoking token monism with property dualism. MacDonald and MacDonald, however, endorse this nonreductive monism from within a property exemplification account of events. In this paper we argue that nonreductive monism, when yoked with the property exemplification account, faces significant difficulties in resolving the twin problems of mental causation and men...

(Final version in The European Journal Of Philosophy (2012) Volume 20, Issue 2, pages 243–259) I offer a novel objection to Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience Argument. I argue that the Supervenience Argument relies upon an untenable conception of the base physical properties upon which mental properties are supposed to supervene: the base properties are required to be both ordinary physical/causal properties and also unconditionally sufficient for the properties that they subvene. But these requirements are mutually exclusive; as a result, at least two premises in the Supervenience Argument are false. I argue that this has disruptive consequences both for the reductive position that Kim defends and the non-reductive position that he attacks. Neither side in the debate over the status of functionally conceived mental properties comes out unscathed.

Philosophia, 2014

Jaegwon Kim’s influential exclusion argument attempts to demonstrate the inconsistency of nonreductive materialism in the philosophy of mind. Kim’s argument begins by showing that the three main theses of nonreductive materialism, plus two additional considerations, lead to a specific and (by now) familiar picture of mental causation. The exclusion argument can succeed only if, as Kim claims, this picture is not one of genuine causal overdetermination. Accordingly, one can resist Kim’s conclusion by denying this claim, maintaining instead that the effects of the mental are always causally overdetermined. I call this strategy the ‘overdetermination challenge’. One of the main aims of this paper is to show that the overdetermination challenge is the most appropriate response to Kim’s exclusion argument, at least in its latest form. I argue that Kim fails to adequately respond to the overdetermination challenge, thus failing to prevent his opponents from reasonably maintaining that the effects of the mental are always causally overdetermined. Interestingly, this discussion reveals a curious dialectical feature of Kim’s latest response to the overdetermination challenge: if it succeeds, then a new, simpler and more compact version of the exclusion argument is available. While I argue against the consequent of this conditional, thereby also rejecting the antecedent, this dialectical feature should be of interest to philosophers on either side of this debate.