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Counterfactual Causation and Mental Causation

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Abstract

Counterfactual conditionals have been appealed to in various ways to show how the mind can be causally efficacious. However, it has often been overestimated what the truth of certain counterfactuals actually indicates about causation. The paper first identifies four approaches that seem to commit precisely this mistake. The arguments discussed involve erroneous assumptions about the connection of counterfactual dependence and genuine causation, as well as a disregard of the requisite evaluation conditions of counterfactuals. In a second step, the paper uses the insights of the foregoing analyses to formulate a set of counterfactuals-based conditions that are characterized as sufficient to establish singular causal claims. The paper concludes that there are ample reasons to believe that some mental events satisfy all these conditions with respect to certain further events and, hence, that mental events sometimes are causes.

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Notes

  1. For a detailed exposition of the philosophical problem underlying this debate, cf. for example Harbecke 2008, ch. 1.

  2. 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; Woodward 2010, 2011). 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. However, they form a special case as they are essentially based on the notion of an independent intervention, and as they are not intended to be reductive theories of causation. Section “Interventionist Causation and C.A.R.E.” points out how the solution developed in this paper relates to the interventionist approaches.

  3. “Partly necessary”, because one of the conditions fails to be satisfied in cases of genuine overdetermination and pre-emption. These exceptional cases require a detailed discussion that goes beyond my present aim, but cf. Bennett (2003).

  4. More precisely, the counterfactuals should be written as “O(ℰ 1)□→O(ℰ 2)” and “¬O(ℰ 1)□→ ¬O(ℰ 2)”, where O(ℰ 1) and O(ℰ 2) are intended as first-order sentences describing events ℰ 1 and ℰ 2. Throughout the paper, we avoid this notational complication and leave implicit the important distinction between expression and referent.

  5. Cases showing that counterfactual dependence is sometimes too restrictive to count as a criterion for causation are overdetermining, preempting (Lewis 1973a, 567), and trumping (Schaffer 2000) causes. A case showing that counterfactual dependence is too permissive a criterion is the “problem of large causes” discussed below.

  6. It may be argued that this interpretation has bizarre consequences. For instance, the closest world where WW2 didn’t happen would be one where the space-time region actually occupied by WW2 is empty. Surely this isn’t the most similar world where WW2 doesn’t happen. However, the point remains: If a circular criterion is to be avoided, the most similar world where WW2 doesn’t happen cannot automatically be used for evaluating the relevant counterfactuals for a causal analysis. It must indeed be a non-WW2 world that may not be the closest non-WW2 world, but that contains the mentioned big void.

  7. A more precise definition of what such a “minimization”, or an “adjustment“, could be is given in section “A Proposal”.

  8. For details on the fine-grained ontology of events, cf. Kim 1973. The remainder of the paper implicitly assumes that the object and time specification that a fine-grained event contains assigns a determined space-time extension to every event. In our example, c and e are taken to be objects and M, M* are taken to be mental properties had by these objects, and P, P* are taken to be physical properties had by the objects.

  9. This argumentative strategy is reflected by Baker (1993) who 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 “\(\ldots \)the problem of mental causation just melts away.” (op. cit., 93). A similar view is expressed by Loewer (2001, 2002): “Suppose that ¬Mc □→ ¬P * e so Mc is a putative cause of P*e. \(\ldots \) The non-reductive physicalist holds that there are mental events Mc that are putative causes that are not pre-empted by events that they themselves don’t pre-empt.” (2002, 660; minor modifications). In the author’s view, this insight proves that at least some mental events are causes.

  10. This line of thought is explored by (Loewer 2007) when he claims that “\(\ldots \)[non-reductive physicalism] holds that [due to supervenience] the connection between Pc and Mc is one of metaphysical not merely nomological necessitation. In the most similar world at which \(\neg Mc\) it is also \(\neg Pc\) since there is no question of “breaking” the metaphysical connection. So in this situation ¬Mc □→ ¬P * e may well be true” (op. cit., 257; minor modifications). For slightly less explicit versions of the line of argument, cf. Kroedel (2008), Heil and Mele (1991, 68) Horgan (1989, 61) and Kallestrup (2006, 473).

  11. This style of argument is clearly pursued by Mills (1996, 107–109) and List and Menzies (2007, 18). Slightly less explicit versions are found in Pietroski (1994, 358), Kallestrup (2006, 473), and Raatikainen (2006, 7).

  12. An argument of this kind is at the core of Bennett (2003). A related line of thought seems to be present in LePore and Loewer (1987, 639).

  13. Note that the theory presented in section “A Proposal” mirrors an influential idea that Yablo (1992) has elaborated long ago. However, note also that the former theory differs from the latter substantially. In particular, the theory defended here can bypass Yablo’s essentialist framework. Furthermore, the proposed formulation of the four counterfactual conditions differ from Yablo’s in important details. Finally, it is not clear that Yablo would agree with the parallelist picture that the theory defended here suggests. I leave it to the reader to analyze these differences in more detail.

  14. To make this assumption plausible to some extent, consider the fact that, if a world contains the two events of “Jack’s jumping into the pool” and of “Jill’s jumping into the pool”, then that world also seems to contain the event of “Jack’s and Jill’s jumping into the pool”. This pattern seems to generalize. One might argue, of course, that event fusion should be restricted in some way, e.g. to spatially contiguous events. For the current project, it is sufficient to assume that there is a large number of fused events, whatever the restrictions on fusion.

  15. This assumption corresponds in some way to a minimality constraint that is familiar from regularity theories of causation (cf. Mackie 1974, 62; Baumgartner 2008, 330).

  16. If in addition to \(Mc^{\prime }\) and \({Mc^{\prime \prime }}\) perhaps certain other mental events in different brain regions were required for the occurrence of the desire to extend one’s arm forward towards the glass, then we could fuse all of these together with \(Mc^{\prime }\) and \(Mc^{\prime \prime }\) into a further event \(Mc+\) which would then satisfy Adequacy with respect to M*e.

  17. Since discussions of mental causation usually focus on actual events, we spare an explanation of how conditions Enoughness and Requiredness extract a genuine cause of a given non-actual possible effect from a sequence of co-instantiated non-actual possible candidate causes. However, the explanation would proceed analogously to the one in the text.

  18. Note that, with the fourth principle introduced at the beginning of this section, we ensure that there is no event inhabiting the mentioned space-time region that is not contained in the sequence (unless it does not causally compete with any event in the sequence).

  19. That this will be so in “almost all” cases is is a strong assumption that I leave undefended here due to lack of space. It should be noted, however, that it follows from the plausible assumption that for any two non-identical events \(\mathcal {P}\)and \(\mathcal {Q}\) occurring at a world w such that \(\mathcal {P}\) is a supervenience base of \(\mathcal {Q}\), the closest \(\neg \mathcal {P}\) world will almost always be closer to w than the closest \(\neg \mathcal {Q}\) world.

  20. The coincidence is important, for the theory does not imply that there cannot be many causes of the same event. It only says that, within the supervenience hierarchy of the same space-time region, there can, or is typically, only one event that can be considered a cause of an effect in question.

  21. It should be noted though that there are some important differences between classical Lewisian counterfactual theories of causation and Woodwardian ones. For instance, the former are intended to offer a reductive account of causation, whereas Woodward makes clear that his account is non-reductive (cf. Woodward 2003, 20-22).

  22. Note that there is a close correspondence between this argument and thoughts presented by (Raatikainen 2006, 5–6) and (Weslake 2009, 5–18).

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    Jens Harbecke

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Harbecke, J. Counterfactual Causation and Mental Causation. Philosophia 42, 363–385 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9496-4

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