Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Jakob Hohwy, The Conception of Mental Causation.Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conception of mental causation that is presupposed in the current debate. I propose that in order to make sense of our firm belief in mental causation we need to operate with a broader conception of it than is normally seen, focusing on common-sense aspects concerning the timing, awareness, control, and tracking of mental causation. However, prominent studies in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience show that mental causation is not as self-evident, robust, and pervasive as our firm belief in it would suggest. There is therefore a tension between the common-sense, broad conception of mental causation and our empirical evidence for mental causation. A full defense of mental causation is not just a matter of securing causal efficacy but also of situating our notion of mental properties in relation to difficult issues concerning awareness, control, and judgment. Key words: mental causation, conscious will, agency, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience..No categories
Similar books and articles
In this paper I argue that causation is an essentially macroscopic phenomenon, and that mental causes are therefore capable of outcompeting their more specific physical realizers as causes of physical effects. But I also argue that any causes must be type-identical with physical properties, on pain of positing inexplicable physical conspiracies. I therefore allow macroscopic mental causation, but only when it is physically reducible.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography
| Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper I do three things. First, I argue that Stephen Yablo’s influential account of mental causation is susceptible to counterexamples involving what I call disproportional mental causation. Second, I argue that similar counterexamples can be generated for any alternative account of mental causation that is like Yablo’s in that it takes mental states and their physical realizers to causally compete. Third, I show that there are alternative nonreductive approaches to mental causation which reject the idea of causal competition, and which thus are able to allow for disproportional mental causation. This, I argue, is a significant advantage for such noncompetitive accounts.
No categories
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Epistemological approaches to mental causation argue that the notorious problem of mental causation as captured in the question “How can irreducible, physically realized, and potentially relational mental properties be causally efficacious in the production of physical effects?” has a very simple solution: One merely has to abandon any metaphysical considerations in favor of epistemological considerations and accept that our explanatory practice is a much better guide to causal relevance than the metaphysical reasoning carried out from the philosophical armchair. I argue that epistemological approaches to mental causation do not enjoy any genuine advantage over theories which treat the problem of mental causation as a genuinely metaphysical problem.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The problem of mental causation is discussed by taking into account some recent developments in the philosophy of science. The problem is viewed from the perspective of the new interventionist theory of causation developed by Woodward. The import of the idea that causal claims involve contrastive classes in mental causation is also discussed. It is argued that mental causation is much less a problem than it has appeared to be.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: mv.helsinki.fi | Scholar | More options ...
| | Other links: mv.helsinki.fi | Scholar | More options ... The central problem for a realist about mental causation is to show that mental causation is compatible with the causal completeness of physical systems. This problem has seemed intractable in large part because of a widely held view that any sort of systematic overdetermination of events by their cause is unacceptable. I account for the popularity of this view, but argue that we ought to reject it. In doing so, I show how we thereby undermine the idea that mental causes must be naturalizable in order to be legitimate. Thus I argue that a non-naturalist conception of mental causation is compatible with a plausible kind of physicalism.
No categories
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The by now famous exclusion problem for mental causation admits only one
possible solution, as far as I can see, namely: that mental and physical properties are linked by
a vertical relation. In this paper, starting from what I take to be sensible premises about
properties, I will be visiting some general relations between them, in order to see whether,
first, it is true that some vertical relation, other than identity, makes different sorts of
causation compatible and second, whether physical and mental properties can be pairs of such
relation.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: sc.ehu.es | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: sc.ehu.es | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Keywords: action, dualism, functionalism, materialism, physicalism Contents 1. What is mental causation? 2. History 3. Mental causation as a problem for dualism 4. Mental causation as a problem for physicalism 5. Mental causation and cognitive science..
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Keywords: action, dualism, functionalism, materialism, physicalism Contents l. What is mental causation? 2. History 3. Mental causation as a problem for dualism 4. Mental causation as a problem for physicalism 5. Mental causation and cognitive science..
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: plato.stanford.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: plato.stanford.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Latham defends the following argument against problems that putatively arise for mental causation: 1. A problem for mental causation arises for a conception of causation only if it attributes a causal role to physical but not mental entities.
No categories
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | More options ...
| | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Jakob Hohwy, The conception of mental causation
 Back
All discussions
Start a new thread
|
There are no threads in this forum |
Nothing in this forum yet.
