Mental causation and the metaphysics of causation

2010

Mental causation is with us all the time. Being a table is different from being a human-although we are composed of physical particles, we have understanding, reason, or perception, which are able to make a difference in the physical world. In this dissertation, I have detail discussions of contemporary substance dualism, the mind-brain identity theory, and Jaegwon Kim's functionalism, and thus conclude that none of them can provide an appropriate account to the problem of mental causation. By distinguishing the mind from the body, substance dualists face the pairing problem: How does this particular mind unite with this particular body and thus interact? With the pairing problem, more and more philosophers accept physicalism. However, it is surprising that the problem of mental causation arises again from the heart of physicalism.

Logic and Philosophy of Science, 2011

If we accept causal exclusion, property dualism and physical determinism, mental epiphenomenalism follows. According to Yablo (1992), we can save mental causation by rejecting causal exclusion and considering the mental/physical relation as an instance of the determinable/determinate relation. In this paper I examine Crane’s argument (2008) against the causal relevance of determinables, and I argue that we still have good reasons to think that determinables may be causally efficacious. As mental properties can be also considered as exhaustive disjunctions of physical realizers, the causal relevance of mental properties is also questioned by the widely shared opinion that disjunctive properties can not be causally efficacious. I consider Clapp’s arguments (2001) in favor of the causal relevance of disjunctive properties, and I conclude that disjunctive properties may survive both Armstrong’s famous objections (1978).

Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology, 2002

This paper takes issue with a widely accepted view of mental causation. This is the view that mental causation is either reducible to physical causation or ultimately untenable, because incompatible with the causal completeness of physics The paper examines, first, why recent attempts to save the phenomena of mental causation by way of the notion of supervenient causation fail The result of t/us 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 m question. By contrast, the specification of these factors at a higher-level would allow establishing such connections. The paper doses with a discussion of how the view of autonomous higher-level causation grounded on counterfactual relations can be made compatible with the physicalistic commitment to a complete specification of the particular causes of any physical effect excl...

Ratio

Forthcoming in Ratio. Please cite published version. According to a popular model of mental causation, an irreducible mental cause M1 brings about an irreducible mental effect M2 by bringing about M2’s supervenience base (ground, realizer, etc.), P2. Call this ‘the Downward Causation View’. This paper raises doubts about the Downward Causation View on grounds that M1 does not cause M2 immediately and there is no causal chain from M1 to M2. Prima facie, then, M1 does not cause M2 on this view. But a theory of mental causation ought to account for how some mental phenomena cause other mental phenomena; so rival theories are to be preferred. After setting out the problem, I consider replies; all fail.

The uploaded paper (Causation and Mental Causation: Standpoints and Intersections) is the introduction to the volume.

Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science

It is arguably an assumption of both common sense and scientific psychology that mental states and events cause events in the physical world. Yet this fact is problematic for both physicalist and dualist theories of the mind.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1995

E-LOGOS – Electronic Journal for Philosophy, 2018

Jaegwon Kim’s views on mental causation and the exclusion argument are evaluated systematically. Particular attention is paid to different theories of causation. It is argued that the exclusion argument and its premises do not cohere well with any systematic view of causation.

In this paper I will discuss Kim's powerful explanatory exclusion argument against the causal efficacy of mental properties. Baker and Burge misconstrue Kim's challenge if they understand it as being based on a purely metaphysical understanding of causation that has no grounding in an epistemo-logical analysis of our successful scientific practices. As I will show, the emphasis on explanatory practices can only be effective in answering Kim if it is understood as being part of the dual-explanandum strategy. Furthermore, a fundamental problem of the contemporary debate about mental causation consists in the fact that all sides take very different examples to be paradigmatic for the relation between psychological and neurobiological explanations. Even if we should expect some alignment in the explanatory scope of neurobiology and psychology/folk-psychology, there is no reason to expect that all mental explanations are exempted by physical explanations, since they do not in general explain the same phenomena.