Contrastive mental causation
- PDF / 349,388 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 22 Downloads / 199 Views
Contrastive mental causation Walter Sinnott-Armstrong1 Received: 6 December 2018 / Accepted: 5 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Any theory of mind needs to explain mental causation. Kim’s (upward) exclusion argument concludes that non-reductive physicalism cannot meet this challenge. One classic reply is that mental properties capture the causally relevant level of generality, because they are insensitive to physical realization. However, this reply suggests downward exclusion (if mental properties are causally efficacious, their physical realizers are causally impotent), contrary to physicalism’s assumption of closure. This paper shows how non-reductive physicalists can solve this problem by introducing a contrastive account of causation with non-exhaustive contrasts. That view has independent justification, because it is also needed to solve other puzzles. On this theory, both a mental property and its physical realizer can cause the same physical effect without lapsing into any problematic overdetermination when they cause that effect in contrast with distinct foils. This contrastive solution has advantages over previous accounts of mental causation and is defended against objections. Keywords Contrastivism · Causation · Mind · Multiple realizability · Reduction · Physicalism · Exclusion Without mental causation, we would all be in trouble. Psychologists could never discover how our beliefs and desires shape our actions. Lawyers could never find any defendant guilty of any crime that requires mens rea (a guilty mind). I could never give my spouse a gift because I love her. Philosophers would have to reject standard views on free will, intentionality, moral responsibility, knowledge of other minds, and many other issues. That is why philosophies of mind need to explain mental causation. The need to accommodate mental causation has plagued dualist theories from the start. How can separate mental substances with no spatial location or energy cause changes in the physical world? How can we tell when a separate mental state is present in other people or ourselves? These difficulties lead some philosophers to reductive physicalism, which claims that mental properties are identical with physical properties,
B 1
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong [email protected] Philosophy Department and Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
123
Synthese
so mental properties can cause effects in the same way that physical properties do. Unfortunately, reductive physicalism runs into separate problems. One major obstacle to reduction is that mental properties are multiply realizable (as I will argue below), so a mental property cannot be identified with any of its potential physical realizers as opposed to the others. Reductionists have also found it very difficult to spell out any details of the reductions that they claim must hold. It is one thing to claim that there must be identities between mental and physical kinds but quite another to specify what those identities are. Those problems toget
Data Loading...
