Abstract

Recent discussion involving causal exclusion, psychophysical laws and content externalism has strongly revived the perennial problem of mental causation. Those inclined to endorse a physicalist but realist stance about the mind are at serious risk of being unwillingly committed to the causal inefficacy of the mental. This is particularly evident given the causal exclusion problem, which concludes that there is no place for mental causation from the principle that there cannot be two complete and independent causes of a single event together with the physicalist commitment to the causal closure of the physical. But if the mind is causally inefficacious, the reality of the mental is threatened, since, plausibly, something can be real only if it has causal powers. Moreover, if explanations track causal relations , the mental may have no role in explanations of behavior. Faced with these problems, many have attempted to redeem the mind's causal potency; I show that those attempts are flawed. Others seem ready to settle for an epiphenomenalism in which the mental is causally inefficacious but causally produced; I argue that an extension of the argument from causal exclusion proscribes uncausing but caused mental states. I conclude that the causal exclusion problem is inescapable for a physicalist property dualist, so she has to live with the causal isolation of the mental. Still, I resist both mental irrealism and the explanatory irrelevance of the mental. As for irrealism, I argue against the standard assumption that for mental states to be real they must be causally efficacious; the reality of the mental can be grounded on a different basis, making use of a qualified notion of ontological dependency. As for explanatory irrelevance, I argue that by adopting a broader, pluralistic explanatory realism we can accommodate explanations involving mental states; the explanatory relevance of the mental can be assured within a model of transitional dependence explanations. The ontological picture that emerges is a new kind of physicalist property dualism which can be called "property parallelism": mental states and properties are real and exist in parallel with the physical correlates upon which they depend, without any causal contact but systematically connected through a relation of mereological supervenience