Causal Exclusion and Overdetermination

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.

philosophy-online.de

Kim's so-called "Supervenience Argument" is one of the most important arguments against nonreductive physicalism, the position that dominates current philosophy of mind. Kim has formulated various versions of this argument since the late eighties, and in his latest book (Kim 2005), he has defended it against various criticisms that have been raised by his opponents. The current paper assesses Kim's response to one of the most important criticisms, the so-called "Generalization Argument" according to which, if sound, the Supervenience Argument would not only show that there is no mental causation, but also that there is no biological, no chemical, no geological causation etc.

(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.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2010

Madison "Let us now turn to an argument designed to show that mind-body supervenience itself leads to apparent difficulties with mental causation," says Kim (1998: 39). This is something of a reversal, for Kim (1984: 103) had earlier argued that supervenient causation is a legitimate form of causation. I prefer Kim's earlier way of thinking. The problem that Kim, in his more recent writings, sees emerging from supervenience is that of causal exclusion. But I think that supervenience by itself does not entail causal exclusion. Belief that it does betrays a metaphysical prejudice that some empirically-informed reflection may help remove. In this paper I take an empirical perspective toward Kim's arguments for causal exclusion and conclude that, from this perspective, supervenience does not have the dire consequences for causal explanation in the specials sciences that Kim thinks it does. The argument to which Kim refers is this (1998: 38-47): 1) Suppose that minds supervene on brains. 2) Consider a case in which an instance of mental property M causes an instance of M*. 3) By (1), M* has supervenience base P*. 4) But then, by (2) and (3), there are two reasons M* is instantiated: because M caused it and because P* is instantiated on this occasion. 5) But, P* is nomologically sufficient for M* and M*'s presence is not possible unless some supervenience base is present. 6) Hence, if M causes M* it must do so by way of causing M*'s supervenience base which, on this occasion, is P*. 7) But, by (1), M too has a supervenience base, P. 8) Hence, there appear to be two independently sufficient causes of P*: M and P. 9) But, overdetermination is unacceptable. 10) Hence, it must be P that causes P*. 11) Hence, the M to M* and M to P* relations are only apparently causal. A critic might approach this argument from a number of directions. For instance, one might wonder about premise (9). Why is overdetermination unacceptable? Kim has two answers (1998: 44-45). First, if both M and P are sufficient for P*, then M is dispensable, and so an appeal to overdetermination to save the efficacy of the mental in fact has the opposite result. Naturally, this response goes both ways. P too is dispensable. Kim addresses this point in his second answer: if M and P overdetermine then it must be true that were P not present then M would by itself cause P*. But this is a violation of physical causal closure, for it is a case of a nonphysical property instance causing a physical one.

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Manuscrito, 2002

It seems that higher-level, nonbasic properties can only manifest their causal powers by exerting causal influence on lower-level, physically basic phenomena in the first place. A very influential line of reasoning conceives of this form of downward causation as either reducible to causation by physical properties or as ultimately untenable, because incompatible with the causal closure of physical reality. The paper argues that this is not so. It examines, first, why it is that a recent attempt by Noordhof to substantiate the notion of supervenient causation in a nonreductive framework fails. The upshot of this examination is the claim that any attempted specification of the most basic causal factors which supposedly underlie a causal transaction cannot account for the counterfactually necessary connections with the effect in question. By contrast, the specification of these factors at a higher level would allow establishing such connections. The paper closes with a discussion of ho...

Philosophical Studies

Our main purpose in this essay is to evaluate the scope of Jaegwon Kim’s ‘supervenience argument’ for reduction. The issue that we want to investigate is whether its conclusion only applies to psychology or it generalizes to all the special sciences. Our contention is that the claim that the supervenience argument generalizes to all the special sciences is ambiguous. We will distinguish three different readings of this objection, and suggest that some of them make it a plausible claim whereas other readings do not make it plausible enough.

Philosophical Studies, 1998

Most physicalists today believe that mental properties can be neurologically realized in many different ways. If some brand of functionalism is correct, then an internal event realizes a mental property in virtue of playing the right functional role, and not because of its intrinsic physical features. This allows that events that differ in neural type might realize the same mental property, the only constraint being that each of these event can play the functional role definitive of that mental property. The belief in multiple realizability is one of the main reasons for the popularity of non-reductive physicalism. If mental states are multiply realizable at the neural level, then they are also multiply realizable, and to a far greater degree, at more basic levels of physical structure ‐ e.g., the molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels. Of course, the properties of the physical sciences are also multiply realizable; the property of being a carbon atom, for instance, is multiply rea...

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.