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Mind in a Humean World

Metaphysica

Abstract

The paper defends Humean approaches to autonomous mental causation against recent attacks in the literature. One important criticism launched at Humean approaches says that the truth-makers of the counterfactuals in question include laws of nature, and there are laws that support physical-to-physical counterfactuals, but no laws in the same sense that support mental-to-physical counterfactuals. This paper argues that special science causal laws and physical causal laws cannot be distinguished in terms of degrees of strictness. It follows that mental-to-physical counterfactuals are supported—or not supported—by laws in just the same way as are physical-to-physical counterfactuals.

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Notes

  1. Describing the relation of mental and physical events in this way is actually problematic as all canonical formulations of the concept of supervenience are not about relations between events but rather between classes of properties (cf. McLaughlin and Bennett 2008). However, at least under a fine-grained event model (cf. Kim 1973) there is a simple and plausible interpretation of the claim that an event supervenes on another. According to this idea, an event e 1 supervenes on another event e 2 if, and only if, the individuals and times of e 1 and e 2 are identical, and the property E 2 instantiated by e 2 is sufficient for the property E 1 instantiated by e 1. This parlance refers to a strong supervenience (cf. Kim 1984) of the property class of E 1 on the property class of E 2.

  2. Baker (1993) claims that satisfaction of the two Lewis counterfactuals is sufficient for causation (cf. op. cit., 93). As the author takes at least some mental events to satisfy these counterfactuals with respect to certain physical events ‘…the problem of mental causation just melts away’. (op. cit., 93). A similar view is expressed by Loewer (2001, 2002). As he says: ‘Suppose that ¬m 1 □→ ¬p 2 so m 1 is a putative cause of p 2. … The non-reductive physicalist holds that there are mental events m 1 that are putative causes that are not pre-empted by events that they themselves don’t pre-empt.’ (Loewer 2002, 660; minor modifications). In the author’s view, this insight proves that at least some mental events are causes.

  3. A related line of argument claims that, from the standpoint of the interventionist theory of causation, there are defensible causal models indicating a causal relevance of the mind (Raatikainen 2006, 5–8; Shapiro and Sober 2007, 241; Weslake 2009, 15–18). Since the structural equations used in such causal models condense sets of counterfactuals (cf. Hitchcock 2007, 501), these approaches bear a certain correspondence to the argument mentioned in the text.

  4. The point is that the inference from ¬p 1 □→ ¬ p 2 and (¬m 1 → ¬p 1) to ¬m 1 □→ ¬p 2 is actually invalid (Lewis 1973b, 32). Hence, in the present case the implicit assumption must be that validity is preserved because the special cases responsible for the invalidity of the corresponding argument schema can be ruled out on the basis of independent reasons.

  5. This line of thought is explored by Loewer (2007b) when he claims that ‘…[non-reductive physicalism] holds that [due to supervenience] the connection between p 1 and m 1 is one of metaphysical not merely nomological necessitation. In the most similar world at which ¬m 1, it is also ¬p 1 since there is no question of ‘breaking’ the metaphysical connection. So in this situation ¬m 1 □→ ¬ p 2 may well be true.’ (op. cit., 257; minor modifications) For slightly less explicit versions of the line of argument, cf. Heil and Mele (1991, 68), Horgan (1989, 61), Kallestrup (2006, 473), Marras (2007, 318–319), and Kroedel (2008, 137f).

  6. It should be mentioned that Esfeld explicitly also attacks more sophisticated Humean accounts of mental causation that are more cautious about the inference from counterfactual dependence to causal claims. One of these is Harbecke (2008, ch. 4), which builds on some insights mentioned by Yablo (1992). This theory denies that counterfactual dependence is sufficient for causation and thereby rejects the inference that Esfeld attacks primarily. In contrast, Harbecke introduces certain further necessary conditions for causation between two actual events φ and ψ, among which is an iterative sufficiency counterfactual such as ¬φ □→ (φ→ ψ) (cf. Rasmussen 1982). But also in Harbecke’s and Yablo’s theories a counterfactual dependence between actual events as defined by Lewis place a central role. Hence, Esfeld’s claim that the relevant counterfactuals must not only be true, but be made true ‘in the right way’ (see below) for them to be causally interpretable is relevant to these theories as well.

  7. The expression ‘P 1 c P 2’ abbreviates a more complex conditional. For the exact logical form that law-like causal generalizations should be taken to have, see the comments below in Section 5.3.

  8. Formulas such as ‘P 1 c P 2’ used in Section 5.1 to express causal regularities should be read as short forms of formulas conforming to this more complex structure.

  9. If one rejects deterministic causation, the conditional should perhaps take the form ‘∀xx[P(Ψ|Φ)]yy & Rxy)’, where P(Ψ|Φ) is the probability of y instantiating Ψ conditional upon x's instantiation of Φ. Of course, if one thinks of physical causal laws as irreducibly probabilistic, their non-strictness is immediately accepted. This is the reason why we restrict our discussion to the existence of deterministic and reducibly probabilistic physical causal laws.

  10. A system that is coupled to a heat bath is a system that is in good thermal contact with a much larger system (the heat bath) with a given temperature. The system and the heat bath can exchange heat and energy freely and since the heat bath is (ideally, infinitely) larger than the system, the temperature of the heat bath stays constant at all times. If the system and the heat bath are both in equilibrium the temperature of the system equals the temperature of the heat bath.

  11. A reversible change to the system is a slow change in time through which the system remains in equilibrium (or very close to it).

  12. It would have to use a formula such as: ‘∀x(G n x and Vx and Tx and F V' x → y(G n y & \( P\prime y \) & \( \left( {P\prime = \frac{{nRT}}{{V\prime }}} \right) \) & Rxy))’. In words, ‘for all spacetime regions x, if they host n moles of gas in a container of volume V, such that the gas acts onto the walls of the container with pressure P and such that a particular force F V' is applied to the container eventually altering it to volume V', then there is a second spacetime region y that is distinct from, but proximate to, x that hosts n moles of gas in a container such that the pressure of the gas equals \( \frac{{nRT}}{{V\prime }} \)’. The length of this expression makes clear why using the compact string of symbols of Eq. 1 is very useful to summarize certain causal laws.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ran Rubin and Michael Esfeld for helpful comments and advice on earlier drafts of this paper. This work has been supported by a fellowship within the postdoctoral programme of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

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Correspondence to Jens Harbecke.

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Harbecke, J. Mind in a Humean World. Int Ontology Metaphysics 12, 213–229 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-011-0086-2

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