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Notes
Shoemaker notes that these may have to be pretty wide properties—i.e., they may have to include relational properties that connect the body causally to things in the environment.
There is an infelicity here. I don’t think that Shoemaker means to be denying that the non-human creatures we generally have in mind when we speak of “animals” are devoid of mental properties. Lots of animals seem to experience pain and pleasure, to have emotions, and to have propositional attitude states, or at least “proto-attitude” states toward “proto-propositions” or something, the explanation of which will probably be functional and involve realization-relations. Chimpanzees and some other primates even seem to possess the “higher” psychological states that some philosophers would make necessary for mentality itself: self-consciousness and communicative intentions for example. I don’t think Shoemaker wants his account of the realization of psychological states to presume that such claims as these about the capacities of non-human animals are all false. Rather, I think he might want to allow that there are, or could be, “chimpanzee-persons” in addition to “chimpanzee-animals” and maybe the same is true for dogs and cats. The matter would turn on whether the chimpanzee’s persistence conditions are keyed to her psychological states or to her animal states.
One might wonder why we need to define a realization relation that holds across different subjects. The person shares her thin properties with the animal, so why not isn’t it just these thin properties—the person’s thin properties—that realize her psychological properties? I’m not entirely sure, but I think the reason is that we do not want there to be too many sets of thin properties in play; we don’t want to solve the too-many-minds problem only to come up with a too-many-bodies problem. I believe, too, that Shoemaker wants it to be true that the person really possesses the thin properties, that a person really has weight and height. So much seems required by physicalism. Perhaps the instances of the thin properties of the person are the same as the instances of the thin properties of the animal and of the body, and then, for the thin properties of the person to realize the thick properties of the person will just be for the thin properties of the animal or of the body to realize the thick properties of the person. But in that case, I don’t see why we need cross-subject realization as well as same-subject realization. I suspect the key to understanding this lies in the theory of microrealization.
Although here I have a question as well: are bodies living bodies? If so, why are they not animals? If “bodies” are simply mereological sums, or lumps—the kind of “thing” the clay of the statue is, then I don’t have any intuitions about what the persistence conditions of the “thing” are.
These are my scruples: (1) a multiply realizable property does not necessarily have to be multiply realized. It could be that in the actual world, there is only one way for a given organism to instantiate some particular cognitive architecture, and that the realizing properties are neurologically quite specific. Then there might only be one way for a property like “believing that there is a square” to be realized in actuality. Still, the possibility of there being other kinds of creatures with different kinds of nervous systems would be enough to block the identification of that cognitive property with the neurological property that is, in fact, its only realizer. (2) Since there are no constraints on the properties that one can “select” to be the “realizers” of a phony property, there’s no barrier to choosing the “realizers” strategically so as to ensure the satisfaction of the counterfactual condition with respect to some genuine property.
See Kim (2008).
References
Antony, L. (1999). Multiple realizability, projectibility, and the reality of mental properties. Philosophical Topics, 26(1 & 2), 1–24 (Spring & Fall) (Special issue in honor of Sydney Shoemaker).
Antony, L. (2003). Who’s afraid of disjunctive properties? Philosophical Issues, 13 1–21.
Kim, J. (2008). Multiple realization: Keeping it real. In J. Hohwy, J. Kallestrup (Eds.), Being reduced: New essays on reduction, explanation, and causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp. 164–175).
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Antony, L. Realization theory and the philosophy of mind: comments on Sydney Shoemaker’s physical realization . Philos Stud 148, 89–99 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9510-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9510-7