Abstract
What does it take to solve the exclusion problem? An ingenious strategy is Stephen Yablo’s idea that causes must be commensurate with their effects. Commensuration is a relation between events. Roughly, events are commensurate with one another when one contains all that is required for the occurrence of the other, and as little as possible that is not required. According to Yablo, one event is a cause of another only if they are commensurate. I raise three reasons to doubt that this account solves the exclusion problem successfully. First, it leaves a mystery about what determines a particular’s causal capacities. Second, because there are two ways of construing coincidence between particulars, a dilemma arises: either the solution to the exclusion problem is threatened, or the account of coincidence loses an attractive feature concerning ontological economy. Third, even if we assume the commensuration constraint, a plausible principle about overdetermination seems to regenerate the exclusion problem.
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Notes
Yablo (1992).
Yablo (1987).
E.g., in Kim (1998).
Strictly speaking, the exclusion principle, (4), should make the qualification that any event with two causally independent causes is overdetermined, where two events are causally independent just in case neither is a cause (or causal ancestor) of the other. Overdetermination does not occur in virtue of an effect’s having multiple causal antecedents in the form of a chain. (3), then, needs to be strengthened to say that mental events are causally independent from the relevant physical ones, which the physicalist should be happy to grant (since the relevant physical events are coincident with, rather than causes of, the mental events). For the sake of simplicity, I leave out these qualifications in the main text.
It would be a stretch to claim that common sense has an opinion (de dicto, at least) on whether mental causes are nonredundant causes. But common sense may well hold both that mental events are not physical events and that actions are caused by mental events alone. Thus (5) is inconsistent with propositions plausibly attributed to common sense.
Yablo (1992, p. 274).
Circularity creeps in, according to Yablo, because we need to qualify character with categorical in the definiens. For any property, P—categorical or not—if x has P then automatically, x is possibly P in any world in which x exists at all. So even when P is categorical, being P depends in some sense on being possibly P in other worlds. (If ‘depends’ is understood to be asymmetrical, or replaced with an asymmetrical notion, the problem can be avoided. E.g., if ‘in virtue of’ expresses an asymmetric relation of determination, then we could say P is categorical iff if x has P in w, then x does not have P in virtue of how x is at worlds other than w. Then, even though at any world other than w, x is automatically possibly P, it is not in virtue of that transworld fact that x is P at w.).
It is worth considering whether the kinds pre-theoretical judgment to which Yablo apeals are truly about what causes what, rather than what (contrastively) explains what. Of course, one might think that our pre-theoretical judgments about what explains what (at least for a certain kind of explanation) are a reasonably reliable guide to what causes what.
Yablo (1992, p. 274).
As I read Shoemaker, this is the view propounded in Shoemaker (2001). For criticism, see Audi forthcoming.
The distinction could also be drawn in terms of how many tropes of C-ness there are among p and q:
- (17*):
-
If p and q are coincident and share categorical property, C, then p and q share a C-ness trope.
- (18*):
-
If p and q are coincident and share categorical property, C, then each has a C-ness trope but the C-ness of p is not the C-ness of q.
Paul Kelleher gave me this example. Compare Shoemaker’s Salvo example, Shoemaker (2007, p. 13).
We must pretend that the end of the bat is not causally relevant to how the ball comes off the bat, which of course is not really the way things work. But this idealization will serve to make the point.
It may sound strange to speak of an object undergoing an event. But if events are changes, this should not be odd, since we are happy to speak of an object undergoing a change.
According to the 2-instance view, the slamming has instance 1 essentially, and the closing has instance 2 contingently. Nothing has instance 2 essentially and nothing has instance 1 contingently.
‘Causes’ in (4) must be understood in the sense that entails causal sufficiency for the argument to go through. That is, the mental causes are not merely causally contributing factors, but independently sufficient causes. This is a common assumption of exclusion arguments.
One defensive strategy for Yablo would be to hold that, after all, both events are commensurate—and so both are causes, and this is overdetermination in terms of causes—because each is essentially a yelling or uttering of your name, and that is the commensurate essence. This raises two difficult questions. First, will all overdetermination in terms of causes require such disjunctive essences? Second, should we allow such disjunctive essences? I for one am opposed to disjunctive essences. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for this point.
Yablo himself says “I find no fault with dualism or with the associated picture of mental phenomena as necessitated by physical phenomena which they are possible without” (1992, p. 250). But as I read him, ‘dualism’ refers only to the non-identity of mental and physical events. Furthermore, the asymmetrical necessitation of mental events by physical ones is compatible with holding that while a given mental event necessitates no particular physical event, one or another physical event is required for the occurrence of the mental event. Perhaps, however, he would reject that last clause.
References
Audi, P. (forthcoming). Properties, powers, and the subset account of realization. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Kim, J. (1998). Mind in a physical world. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Shoemaker, S. (2001). Realization and mental causation. In Gillett, C. & Loewer, B. (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents (pp. 74–98). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shoemaker, S. (2007). Physical realization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yablo, S. (1987). Identity, essence, and indiscernibility. The Journal of Philosophy, 84, 293–314.
Yablo, S. (1992). Mental causation. The Philosophical Review, 101, 245–280.
Acknowledgments
I warmly thank Karen Bennett and Gideon Rosen for extremely helpful discussion of these matters, and comments on early drafts. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies, from whom I received very helpful comments. For other invaluable discussion I thank Robert Audi, Mark Greenberg, Paul Kelleher, Colin Klein, Adam Kovach, Gabe Love, Mark McCullagh, Keith McPartland, Chris Mole, and Justin Tiehen. I presented an ancestor of this paper at the 2005 meeting of the Pacific Division of the APA.
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Audi, P. Causation, coincidence, and commensuration. Philos Stud 162, 447–464 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9776-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9776-4