Abstract
Loewer (in: Physicalism and its discontents, 2001; Philos Phenomenol Res 65:655–663, 2002; in: Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, 2007) has argued that the nonreductive physicalist should respond to the exclusion problem by endorsing the overdetermination entailed by their view. Kim’s (Physicalism, or something near enough, 2005; in: Contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, 2007) argument against this reply is based on the premise that mental causation must be a productive relation in order to sustain human agency. In this paper, I challenge the premise that mental causation is a productive relation by appealing to the underlying double prevention structure of the physiological mechanisms of human action. Since the causal pathways from an agent’s mental events to bodily movement involves an absence, mental causation is not productive. This places Kim in a troublesome dilemma in his debate with Loewer: either surrender mental causation or deny that causation is a productive relation. With the support offered for productive mental causation undermined, responses to the exclusion problem based on accepting overdetermination remain viable options for the nonreductive physicalist.
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Notes
It seems to be a working assumption in both Loewer and Kim’s discussion that there is just a single kind of causation in which both mental and non-mental events enter as cause and effect. At the very least, it is presupposed that when mental events enter into causal relations, they are entering into the very same relation as neurophysiological events. Also, Loewer and Kim agree that mental and neurophysiological events have the same effects; I shall refer to these effects as actions, behaviors, or bodily movements. If mental and neurophysiological events did not cause the same effects, there would be no threat of overdetermination. For a discussion of both these background assumptions, see Crane (1995) and Dretske (1988) respectively.
States should also be included amongst those spatiotemporal particulars that enter into causal relations. If there are metaphysical differences between events and states, they will not matter to the present discussion. At any rate, the causal relation I am concerned with takes as relata those entities named by perfect nominals, which, as Vendler (1967) and Bennett (1988, 2002) have argued, are events and states (e.g., ‘Socrates’s guzzling of the hemlock’, ‘Judas’s betrayal’, ‘the presence of oxygen’, ‘your ignorance of chemistry’). For simplicity, I speak here only of events.
See Lewis (1983), Chalmers (1996), and Jackson (1998) for a characterization of physicalism which requires that every world that minimally matches our world with respect to the pattern and distribution of physical property instantiations also matches our world with respect to the pattern and distribution of mental property instantiations. A more precise specification of physicalism will not be necessary for present purposes. Also, see Yablo (1992) and Shoemaker (2003, 2007) for physicalists who reject thesis (3) when framed in terms of causes qua difference-makers, but endorse it when framed in terms of causes qua sufficient conditions. This response to the exclusion problem depends on accepting a proportionality constraint on the causal relation. See Bontly (2005) for criticisms.
Woodward (2008) argues that, within his interventionist framework for understanding causation, overdetermination is the wrong picture of the causal role of the mental presuming its supervenience on the neurophysiological. See also Horgan (1997) and Bennett (2003, 2008) for arguments to this effect and Aimar (2011) for criticisms. Those who defend this response deny that (1)–(4) are inconsistent since they do not accept that (1)–(3) entail the denial of (4). Although worth serious consideration, I cannot address the adequacy of this response here.
How might mental and neurophysiological events be related if they are not one and the same? Some proposals in the literature consistent with this nonreductive brand of physicalism are determination (see Yablo 1992), constitution (see Pereboom 2002), and realization (see Kim 1998 and Shoemaker 2003, 2007).
To be clear, Kim dismisses the overdetermination response only sometimes. In this paper, I will be concerned with Kim’s later considerations against this response, but it is worth mentioning some of his earlier arguments as well. Kim claims that systematic mental overdetermination has the consequence that thesis (3) (i.e., Completeness) fails to hold in other possible worlds (Kim 1998). However, Crisp and Warfield (2001) convincingly argue that the nonreductive physicalist should not be concerned with this consequence, since the worlds in which Completeness fails to hold are one’s in which the physicalist’s supervenience thesis does not hold (see fn. 4). Thus, these worlds are (nomologically or metaphysically) impossible. I think it is right to wonder why the physicalist should be worried about Completeness failing to hold in impossible worlds (Crisp and Warfield 2001).
Previously, I claimed that Loewer held that systematic overdetermination is problematic only if causation is a productive relation. From this and his denial that causation is productive, he concludes that this overdetermination is not a problem. Now, I am claiming that systematic overdetermination is problematic if causation is a productive relation. As I will discuss shortly, Kim uses this conditional along with his commitment to productive causation to argue that overdetermination is problematic. Really, I think each author accepts the biconditional: systematic overdetermination is problematic if and only if causation is a productive relation.
This passage might suggest that this is just Kim’s intuition about what causal relations are needed to ground agency. But, in fact, Kim has presented some arguments to this effect. First, he has argued that counterfactual dependence theories leave unanswered the real question: why are the counterfactuals that ground mental causation true? He says that simply asserting they are “misconstrues” the philosophical task of vindicating mental causation (Kim 1998). Second, Kim argues that counterfactual theories fail on their own terms, since they cannot distinguish between genuine causal relations and pseudo-causal relations (Kim 1998, 2007). As might be expected, Loewer has disputed both of Kim’s claims. First, he argues that the relevant counterfactuals are made true by the fundamental laws and facts of physics and, second, that counterfactual theories have no trouble distinguishing between genuine causal relations and pseudo-causal relations (Loewer 2007).
Negative causation includes cases of omissions (viz., an absence causes a presence), preventions (viz., a presence causes an absence), and omissions of prevention (viz., an absence causes an absence).
Could mental events influence bodily movements through a mechanism that bypasses the physiological mechanisms of muscle contraction, say through a simple, direct, and unmediated mechanism or a non-physical mechanism which works independently of the body? Yes, but these bypass hypotheses are at odds with what we have learned from our study of neurodegenerative disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders, ALS is a neurological disease that affects the motor nerve cells responsible for the control of voluntary muscle movement. As the motor neurons degenerate and die from the disease, the person loses the power to intentionally control their own bodies. On the one hand, this loss of intentional control in virtue of the degeneration and death of the motor neurons would be very surprising if some bypass hypothesis were true. Why should mental events lose their efficacy vis-à-vis bodily movements given the “malfunctioning” of a physiological mechanism circumvented by those mental events? However, this same evidence would be much less surprising if the overlap hypothesis were true. After all, we should expect mental events to lose their efficacy vis-à-vis bodily movements if the mechanism they utilize to influence the body “malfunctions” or “breaks down”. Thus, the overlap hypothesis makes the evidence far more likely than any of the bypass hypotheses. Kim (1989) expresses his commitment to something like the overlap hypothesis when he remarks that mental events “must somehow make use of the causal chain from an appropriate central neural event to the muscle contraction”. The information concerning ALS is from the “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Fact Sheet,” NINDS. Publication date June 2013 and retrieved from: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/amyotrophiclateralsclerosis/detail_ALS.htm on August 6th, 2013.
For instance, it follows on Dowe’s theory of negative causation that claims of mental causation do not express genuine causal relations, but instead merely counterfactual claims about genuine causal relations. See Dowe (2001).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this point to my attention.
This change—an actual, positive occurrence—satisfies many of the central conceptual connotations of causation making it a good candidate for serving as a causal intermediary in the causal chain leading up the bodily movements. For example, (a) if this change had not occurred, the myosin heads would not have bound to the actin sites, (b) the probability of the myosin heads binding to the actin given the circumstances and this change is greater than the probability of the binding given the circumstances and no change, (c) if an agent wanted to manipulate whether the binding occurs, they could do so by manipulating the occurrence of this change, (d) if one knows that this change occurred, one is in a good position to know that the myosin heads will bind to the actin sites, and, finally, (e) ‘Because this change occurred’ may be a good answer to the explanatory question ‘Why did the myosin bind to the actin?’. See Schaffer (2004a) for a discussion of the conceptual connotations of causation as they relate to negative causation.
I say the appropriate transferences because of the problem of traces. Suzy throws a rock at an empty bottle while Billy watches. There are all kinds of spatiotemporally local and contiguous processes involving the exchange of energy-momentum running from Billy to the bottle, but none of these make Billy’s watching a cause of the shattering. This is why Production is only stated as a necessary and not sufficient condition on causation. See Schaffer (2000) for a discussion of this issue.
It is worth mentioning that Hall registers his reservations about calling each kind of causation equally genuine when he remarks that “production does seem, in some sense, to be the more ‘central’ causal notion” (Hall 2004).
The remarks in this note were inspired by the comments of an anonymous referee. Perhaps if these “P-events” were identified with some mental event that does play an intuitive role in our picture of human agency (e.g., tryings, willings, or intendings) we can mitigate the burden outlined above. For instance, if these “P-events” are tryings, then the replacement thesis for (1) remains intuitively plausible independent of (1), since the claim that mental events are among the causes of tryings is part of our ordinary picture of human agency. Nevertheless, there remain some problems worth mentioning. First, the exclusion problem still becomes less interesting since it is not our doing of some action that is threatened by (2)–(4) but only our trying to do that action. This suggestion cannot mitigate the entire philosophical burden outlined above. Secondly, taking this line would seem to saddle one with the prima facie peculiar view that our beliefs and desires cause our, e.g., trying to bake a cake but not our baking of the cake. Finally, it may also be dialectically inappropriate to identify “P-events” with tryings. In the present context, this move begs the question against the proponent of the overdetermination response who is arguing that the double prevention dilemma shows that a nonreductive response to the exclusion argument remains viable for the physicalist.
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Russo, A. Kim’s dilemma: why mental causation is not productive. Synthese 193, 2185–2203 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0837-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0837-7