Online research in philosophy

The paper begins with a restatement of Chalmers’s “hard problem of consciousness.” It is suggested that an interactionist approach is one of the possible solutions of this problem. Some fresh arguments against the identity theory and epiphenomenalism as main rivals of interactionism are developed. One of these arguments has among its corollaries a denial of local supervenience, although not of the causal closure principle. As a result of these considerations a version of “local interactionism” (compatible with causal closure) is proposed. It is argued that local interactionism may offer a fruitful path for resolving the “hard problem.”.

One of the things C. D Broad argued many years ago is that certain 'scientific' arguments against dualist interactionism come back in the end to a metaphysical bias in favor of materialism. Here the authors pursue this basic strategy against another 'scientific' argument against dualism itself. The argument is called 'the argument from continuity'. According to this argument the fact that organisms and species develop by insensible gradations renders dualism implausible. The authors try to demonstrate that this argument fails to establish the implausibility of dualism.

Quantum indeterminism may make available the option of an interactionism that does not have to pay the price of a force over and above those forces that are acknowledged in physics in order to explain how intentions can be physically effective. I show how this option might work in concrete terms and offer a criticism of it.

The views of linguistic analysts and objectivists are explored with regard to the question of interactionism. It is argued that the admission of a logical difference between explanation by cause and explanation by motive cannot disqualify causal explanations of human action, cannot be construed as challenging the competence of science, and cannot count against interactionism. It is also argued that objectivist programs for eliminating mentalistic concepts either implicitly admit interactionism or cannot distinguish relevantly between interactionism and parallelism.