Abstract
1. Jaegwon Kim has claimed that Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit's notion of 'program explanation' is much the same thing as his own notion of 'supervenient causation' (Kim 1998: 74). According to Jackson and Pettit, 'higher-level' properties that are not themselves causally efficacious may nonetheless have a kind of causal relevance that allows them to figure in 'program explanations' of behaviour (Jackson and Pettit 1988, 1990). They have their 'causal relevance' to behaviour by 'programming for' or 'more or less insuring' the instantiation of genuinely efficacious properties. The fragility of a glass, for example, does not itself cause it to break when struck, but it is causally relevant, and can figure in an explanation of the breaking, because it 'programs for' or 'insures' the instantiation of a microstructural property that is genuinely efficacious. Program explanation has some potential for easing worries about mental causation: one might grant that supervening mental properties are not causally efficacious but hold nonetheless that they can figure in program explanations of the effects of their (genuinely efficacious) supervenience bases. Kim proposed supervenient causation for a similar purpose:
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