Dialectica 73 (4):479-505 (2019)
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Abstract |
Nonreductive physicalists endorse the principle of mental causation, according to which some events have mental causes: Sid climbs the hill because he wants to. Nonreductive physicalists also endorse the principle of physical causal completeness, according to which physical events have sufficient physical causes: Sid climbs the hill because a complex neural process in his brain triggered his climbing. Critics typically level the causal exclusion problem against this nonreductive physicalist model, according to which the physical cause is a sufficient cause of the behavioural effect, so the mental cause is excluded from causally influencing Sid’s behaviour. In this paper I demonstrate how numerous nonreductive physicalists have responded to the causal exclusion problem by weakening the principle of physical causal completeness in numerous ways. The result: either numerous nonreductive physicalist solutions fail on account of the fact that they do not satisfy a robustly defined principle of physical causal completeness, or there is an accelerating trend of solving the causal exclusion problem by suitably weakening the principle of physical causal completeness.
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Keywords | Physical Causal Completeness Causal Exclusion Counterfactual Causation Mental Causation Nonreductive Physicalism Difference Making Causation |
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DOI | 10.1111/1746-8361.12281 |
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References found in this work BETA
Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation.Barry Loewer & Jaegwon Kim - 2001 - Journal of Philosophy 98 (6):315.
Physicalism, or Something Near Enough.Jaegwon Kim - 2006 - Philosophical Quarterly 56 (223):306-310.
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2019-12-19
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