Causation in the Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

Causation has come to play an increasingly important role in the philosophy of mind, reaching its apotheosis in the doctrine that to be a mental state of kind K is to fill the causal role definitive of that kind of mental state: the typology of mental states is a typology of causal roles. However, ironically, there is, from this very functionalist perspective, a problem about how to understand the causal role of mental properties, those properties which make a mental state the kind of mental state that it is. This problem surfaces in one way or another in the debates over the language of thought (for instance, in the argument that only if intentional states have syntactic-like structure can they play the required causal roles); over the explanatory role of broad content (for instance, in the argument that broad content is explanatorily irrelevant to behaviour because doppelgangers behave alike while possibly differing in broad content); and over the eliminativist implications of connectionism (for instance, in the argument that certain versions of connectionism falsify the propositional modularity component of the folk conception of the causes of behaviour). We wish, however, to reverse the usual order of discussion. Instead of entering directly into one or another of these fascinating debates, we want to raise the problem of how to understand the causal role of mental properties as an issue in its own right. We will then offer a solution to the problem which seems to us plausible independently of those debates. The final stage of our discussion will be a brief application of the proffered solution to argue that connectionism does not have the eliminativist implications sometimes associated with it.'