Mental causation without downward causation

Philosophical Review

Volumn 115, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 79-103

  Gibbons, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA LINCOLN   (United States)

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EID: 77950039090     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00318108-115-1-79     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Jaegwon Kim has presented t his problem in a number of places. See, for example, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Page references in parentheses are to this work.
2. In this article, I must set aside the important issue of exactly what relation of realization or dependence holds between the mental and the physical. Nothing I say will depend on the details of this relation.
3. See Donald Davidson, "Mental Events", in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 207-27.
4. The relation of causal responsibility or causal relevance is a relation between types analogous to causation, which is a relation between tokens. I will also talk about the causal relevance of facts. When the fact consists in something having a property or a pair standing in a relation, you can take this as talking about the causal relevance of the relevant properties and relations. The relation between causal relevance and causal explanation is much more complicated since the latter notion has both a metaphysical side and an epistemic or pragmatic side. At least most of the time, causal explanations work by pointing to a causally relevant property, but what counts as "pointing to" will be different in different contexts as a result of differences in interests and background knowledge. By choosing simple examples and providing relevant information, I will try to manipulate the context so that being explicit is the contextually relevant way of pointing to causally relevant properties.
5. See, for example, Stephen Yablo, "Mental Causation", Philosophical Review 101 (1992):245-80. Yablo thinks that the relation between the mental and the physical is the relation between determinable and determinate, and he thinks that it's a "truism" that "determinates do not contend with their determinables for causal influence" (259). Also see Sydney Shoemaker, "Realization and Mental Causation", in Physicalism and Its Discontents, ed. Carl Gillett and Barry Loewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 74-98. Shoemaker thinks that the physical realizes the mental and that one property realizes another, roughly, when the causal powers bestowed by the latter are a subset of the powers bestowed by the former. Since distinct properties are bestowing the same causal powers on the same occasion, what makes the view noncompetitive is also what gives rise to at least the appearance of overdetermination.
6. See, for example, Kim, Mind in a Physical World, 38.
7. Davidson, "Mental Events."
8. This is stated partly in terms of "kinds" by which I mean natural kinds. I am fairly liberal when it comes to properties. I believe in the property of being either red or round. I just don't think that property is a natural kind because it is not a causal power or a causally relevant property. For reasons to believe in many properties while retaining a distinction between natural and unnatural kinds, see David Lewis, "New Work for a Theory of Universals", Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983):343-77.
9. This is similar to what Kim calls "the causal inheritance principle" though used for the opposite purpose. Kim is concerned with the idea that the realized cannot have more power than the realizer. But someone who is less concerned about overdetermination than Kim might think that if the realized inherits the power of the realizer, this is power enough.
10. For multiple realization, see Hilary Putnam, "The Nature of Mental States", in Philosophy of Mind, ed. David Chalmers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 73-79.
11. See, for example, Jaegwon Kim, "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction", in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 309-35.
12. Davidson, "Mental Events", 224.
13. This was the view of Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam in "Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (1958):3-36.
14. For the full story on levels, see my "Levels" (unpublished manuscript available on author's Web site, www.unl.edu/philosop/people/faculty/ gibbons/gibbons.html).
15. "A predicate 'P' is a parent of a given predicate 'Q' if among the classes that 'P' applies to is the extension of 'Q.". Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 104. So for Goodman, the extension of 'shade of red' is a set of sets, and the extension of 'scarlet' is one of those sets. But really, the extension of 'shade of red' is not a set of sets; it's a set of properties, and scarlet is one of those properties. This is the minor modification.
16. For the causal individuation of kinds, see Jerry Fodor, Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), chap. 2;
17. and Sydney Shoemaker, "Causality and Properties", in Identity, Cause, and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 206-33.
18. If you're not like me, and you think that events are property exemplifications, then you think that for every different property, there's a different event. So you individuate events pretty much the same way I individuate facts or events-having-properties. If we individuate them in the same way, it won't matter much for present purposes what we call them. For events as property exemplifications, see Jaegwon Kim, "Events as Property Exemplifications", in Supervenience and Mind, 33-52.
19. Does it matter that turning on the light doesn't supervene on flipping the switch? No. Suppose the beauty of the painting supervenes on the total application of paint to canvas. "Why did you put just that paint just there?" "In order to make it beautiful." "And why did you make it beautiful?" "So that the dopes at the gallery will buy it." Your attitude toward the dopes explains making it beautiful but not the particular application of paint.
20. Kim, "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction", 18. The emphasis is in the original.
21. The formulation in Mind in a Physical World (54) is in terms of functional properties and the properties that realize them.
22. The example originally comes from Davidson, "Causal Relations", in Essays on Actions and Events, 161.
23. When we're talking about fine-grained events, one event supervenes on another when the constitutive property of the one supervenes on the constitutive property of the other.
24. The pioneers of fine-grained events, Kim and Alvin Goldman, did not think of dependence, or "level generation" as they called its converse, in terms of supervenience. Xantippe's becoming a widow depends on or is the result of Socrates' death, but the death, while sufficient in the circumstances, isn't really a supervenience base. This is the standard case. If you turn on a light by flipping a switch or vote by raising your arm, we have dependence without supervenience. For Goldman, John's saying 'hello' loudly is generated by, and so depends on, John's saying 'hello'. But saying 'hello' loudly doesn't supervene on saying 'hello'. Saying 'hello' supervenes on saying 'hello' loudly. For Goldman on level generation, see A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), chap. 2.
25. The example comes from Yablo, "Mental Causation", 257, though I'm not sure he would approve of the use to which I'm putting it. For me, this is a paradigm case of competition between determinables and determinates.
26. Yablo, "Mental Causation", 277.
27. Jerry Fodor has been emphasizing the importance of generalizations from the very beginning. See "Special Sciences", in Chalmers, Philosophy of Mind, 126-35.
28. But wait. The relevant causal power may be psychologically contaminated, but it still entails that p is true. Can't we tell a priori that nothing like that could be a psychological kind? No. That's not the kind of thing you can tell a priori. But more importantly, it's only when philosophers are talking about psychology that the existence of the external world is supposed to be irrelevant. When psychologists are doing psychology, our interaction with the world is actually the point. See, for example, the nearest psychology textbook.
29. I am inclined to take a similar line on cases where a thought causes an increase in your heart rate or it causes you to blush or break out in a cold sweat. These look like cases of downward causation, but considerations of generality suggest that the mental properties may not be doing the work. Although we do expect the connections between kinds of thoughts and these kinds of bodily reactions to hold for other humans, we do not expect them to hold for nonhumans, even those who are capable of having and fully appreciating the relevant thoughts. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for the Philosophical Review for raising this objection.