Tese
de Mestrado (Mphil - Jan 2006 - King's College London)
Nonreductive Physicalism and Mental
Causation
Abstract
In this
work I articulate and defend a problem about the place of the mind in the
causation of behaviour. Ask why someone did a certain action and you can see the
problem arise, if only you assume certain plausible suppositions about the
world. The suppositions are taken to be those of nonreductive materialism.
I think that the argument from exclusion, originally developed by Jaegwon Kim,
shows that unless there is overdetermination, the mental cannot be causally
relevant in the causation of behaviour. It is my view, however, that a proper
understanding of overdetermination shows that the overdetermination move is not
available to the nonreductive physicalist. That is, he cannot escape exclusion
by claiming that the mental overdetermines the physical in the causation of our
actions.
It is argued that neither appeals to economy nor to Bennett’s counterfactual
test are good ways to decide matters of overdetermination. That should be
decided in terms of the ability of a theory to consistently permit such
overdetermination, which however is shown not to be the case for nonreductive
materialism.
Moreover,
in general all realized properties will face this problem - assuming them to be
causally relevant will ignite exclusionary claims and in the competition for
relevance, physical properties will have a better and more fundamental claim for
relevance, threatening once again to relegate realized properties to the
category of epiphenomena.
When the nonreductive materialist insists in
defending his views against the calls of causal exclusion, I will show that he
moves either towards emergentism, which seems to be something that in the end he
does not want to hold because it violates completeness, or to type physicalism,
which however is unwelcoming because it dilutes the distinctness between the
mental and the physical and the calls of multiple realization
