Abstract
This paper focuses on an influential line of response to the exclusion problem for nonreductive physicalism, one defended with the most subtlety by Karen Bennett. According to this line of thought, a successful nonreductive response to the exclusion problem, a response that allows one to maintain each of the core components of nonreductive physicalism, may consist in showing that the manner in which the effects of mental causes also have distinct and sufficient physical causes is disanalogous to other types of cases in which an effect may have distinct sufficient causes. After laying out the formulation of the exclusion problem that Bennett endorses, along with her response to the problem, I offer an initial critique of this response insofar as it is couched in terms of her preferred formulation. I then present a general critique of disanalogy-style responses to the exclusion problem. I argue that extant implementations of this strategy are at best underdeveloped, and suggest that lack of clarity in the use of “overdetermination” may function to mask the shortcomings of this strategy. While others have questioned the details of such responses, the worries that I raise concern the very logic of the exclusion problem and how such responses fit into this logic.
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Notes
The “causal completeness” of the physical domain just dictates that mental causes of physical occurrences, if distinct from physical ones, are always in addition to already-sufficient physical causes. However, “same-level” mental causation—mental occurrences causing other mental occurrences, such as an experience causing a particular thought—will be jeopardized by any argument against mental-to-physical causation if mental-to-mental causation requires mental-to-physical causation. And it may be argued that this follows from physicalist assumptions about the relationship between the mental and the physical, especially the supervenience of the mental on the physical (see Kim 2005a for discussion).
See Kim 1989a, 1998, and 2005a for developments of the exclusion problem; see also Kim 1989b. Heil 2003 uses related considerations to argue against ontological views that posit levels of reality; Merricks 2003 uses similar reasoning to argue for eliminativism about ordinary objects, given a causal criterion of existence for such objects; Papineau 2006 uses similar premises to argue for physicalism on the grounds that given the causal self-sufficiency of the physical, and the causal efficacy of the mental, mental properties must be either identical to physical properties or metaphysically supervene on them.
Other examples of “textbook overdetermination” may include: two rocks simultaneously striking a window, where the effect is the breaking of the window; a lit match thrown into a pile of hay and a bolt of lightning simultaneously striking a barn, where the effect is the burning of the barn. Cases like these have figured in discussions of the causal relation in virtue of the issues that they raise for proposed analyses of causation (see, for example, Mackie 1974). Bunzle 1979 claims that such “overdetermination” is impossible. For discussion and responses, see Funkhouser 2002 and Schaffer 2003.
See fn. 2.
Versions of these principles are given in Árnadóttir and Crane 2013; Bennett 2003 and 2008, Kim 2005a and 2005b, and elsewhere. For discussion of the completeness thesis, see Papineau 2006. I assume that causes are events, and that an event is a thing having a property. My statement of the exclusion principle presumes, following much work on the exclusion problem (Carey 2011 is an exception), that the issue is whether an effect can have more than one sufficient cause at a time. When the exclusion principle is understood in this way, the supposition is that (3) takes mental causes to be sufficient causes for some physical effects. I believe that most of the relevant issues can be framed in terms of a single sufficient cause and some further, distinct cause for the same effect, regardless of whether the further cause is a sufficient cause. A related issue, which deserves attention but will be set aside, is how “sufficient” in “sufficient cause” ought to be understood.
This line of thought in favor of using (N) and (E) to formulate the exclusion problem is perhaps most explicit in Carey 2011.
This way of characterizing Bennett’s reasoning in terms of “core” realizers is drawn from Keaton and Polger 2014; the distinction between “core” and “total” realizers is from Shoemaker 1981. For example, on a “wide” view of mental content, the “core realizer” for a belief may be a neurophysiological state. However, this state does not metaphysically suffice for a belief with that content, since further environmental conditions are needed as well; these, together with the neurological state, are the “total” realizer for the belief.
This will yield logically distinct versions of (N) and (E) only insofar as the independence of the causes in textbook cases is not itself spelled out in terms of the truth of Bennett’s counterfactuals; hence the extent to which the thesis (EI) given below differs from (EC) will depend on how “independent” is explicated.
See, for example, Kim 1989a, 44; 1989, 83–92; 2005a, 42 and 46–52; and 2005b, 196.
This example is drawn from Shoemaker 2007.
Shoemaker 2007 uses part/whole cases to respond to the exclusion problem by arguing that on his version of nonreductive physicalism, mental causes are parts of physical causes. This does not undermine the point here, since on the formulation that uses (N) and (E), such cases falsify the exclusion principle, regardless of any thesis about the relationship between mental and physical causes on nonreductive physicalism and part/whole cases. Likewise, while one could debate the legitimacy and proper interpretation of the part/whole cases themselves, I do not believe that this would undermine my case: that the formulation allows that the problem could be solved in this way indicates that the problem has been misrepresented.
See Morris (unpublished manuscript) for discussion. While a thorough analysis of this issue here would take me too far afield, a few points are worth noting. First, the idea is not that a nonreductive solution to the exclusion problem must exhibit what it is about the mental qua mental that allows for mental causes to figure as causes in addition to sufficient physical causes. Nor is it being demanded that a nonreductive solution show how mental causation is possible in the sense of providing a mechanism whereby mental causation takes place. Rather, the claim is just that an adequate solution should show that it is not the case that, on nonreductive physicalism, mental causation is problematic. In her influential discussion of the exclusion problem, Bennett (2003, 471) remarks that the exclusion problem is forceful, in part, because it does not “attempt to claim that there is something about the nature of the mental that renders it incapable of causing anything”; rather, it contends that even if mental properties “are perfectly suited to causing things, there is nothing around for them to cause”. In this sense, she supposes (ibid.) that the exclusion problem differs from the problems of mental causation that arise for Cartesian dualism, Davidsonian anomalous monism, and externalism about content. But it is compatible with this that the exclusion problem arises, at least in part, from the specific commitments of nonreductive physicalism, and that an adequate solution should at least in part address these commitments, especially those that concern the nonreductive physicalist’s account of the relationship between mental and physical phenomena. Moreover, insofar as one accepts that an exclusionist is within his or her rights to reject a formulation of the problem in terms of the thesis that no event whatsoever can have more than one sufficient cause at a time, and to do so on the grounds that such a formulation permits for spurious “solutions”, an argument is needed if one is to suppose that the same verdict should not also apply to the present case.
It may be limited because, no exclusionist has, I believe, claimed that nonreductive physicalism has a problem with mental causation on the grounds that accepting mental causes, on nonreductive physicalism, would populate the world with coincidences. Nor, do I believe, has anyone ever pressed exclusionist worries by emphasizing the independence of mental and physical causes. In this sense, the only arguments that would be undermined would be ones that nobody has ever offered.
See fn. 17.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank John Heil, Chris Richards, Kevin Sharpe, and Chiwook Won for helpful comments on related work, and Alex Gelb for assistance in preparing the manuscript. I would also like to thank audiences at 2014 meetings of the Alabama Philosophical Society, the Central States Philosophy Association, and the Southwestern Philosophical Society, as well as participants in John Heil’s 2013 NEH Metaphysics and Mind seminar, for helpful discussion and criticism. Work on this paper was supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, although the views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Endowment.
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Morris, K. Against Disanalogy-Style Responses to the Exclusion Problem. Philosophia 43, 435–453 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9587-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9587-5