The Problem of Mental Causation Formalized

By formalizing the problem of mental causation, we first prove rigorously that the premises of the problem are jointly incompatible. Before the background of the formalizations, we clarify and assess the anti-physicalist argument by Scott Sturgeon and the supervenience argument by Jaegwon Kim. We demonstrate (i) that, contrary to what has sometimes been contended, the negation of the non-identity premise of Kim's version of the supervenience argument is not tantamount to the claim that all mental events are identical to physical events, (ii) that a premise implicitly invoked by Kim is actually required for the validity of the first stage of his supervenience argument, (iii) that precisely this premise makes an epiphenomenalism with respect to mental events an impossible position, and (iv) that there are good reasons to believe in the falsity of this implicit premise which in turn shows that Sturgeon's critique of the supervenience argument is substantive.