Causal Exclusion Argument Research Articles

Mental causation, interventionism, and probabilistic supervenience

Mental causation is notoriously threatened by the causal exclusion argument. A prominent strategy to save mental causation from causal exclusion consists in subscribing to an interventionist account of causation. This move has, however, recently been challenged by several authors. In this paper, we do two things: We (i) develop what we consider to be the strongest version of the interventionist causal exclusion argument currently on the market and (ii) propose a new way how it can in principle be overcome. In particular, we propose to replace strict supervenience in the assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical by probabilistic supervenience and show how this move has the potential to license the inference to mental causation. Finally, we argue that probabilistic supervenience captures some of the most important intuitions that strict supervenience captures and discuss possible objections to weakening strict supervenience in the way we suggest.

The Causal Exclusion Argument and its Critique in Debates on Reductionism: The Case of One Specific Clash

The Causal Exclusion Argument and its Critique in Debates on Reductionism: The Case of One Specific Clash

Emergence in Ontic Structural Realism

The paper outlines the understanding of emergence in Ontic Structural Realism of James Ladyman (and his co-author Ross). First, the notion of emergence is explored, surveying the various distinctions associated with it (ontological vs. epistemological, diachronic vs. synchronic, weak vs. strong). It turns out that Ross and Ladyman’s notion of emergence is that of weak epistemological emergence compatible with ontic reduction. Particular notions of emergence are associated with the objection embodied in the Generalized Causal Exclusion Argument. The latter is sketched and the solution of Ross and Ladyman is presented: first, in general, the notion of weak emergence is not threatened by this objection. Causal reduction associated with it ensures that there are no competing causal explanations, so no overdetermination arises. Second, there is a peculiar feature of Ross and Ladyman’s theory; namely, there is no causation on the fundamental level, only pattern dynamism. Causation emerges only on higher levels of special sciences. Hence, there is no problem of causal overdetermination.

More on realism, phenomenology, and causation, in reply to Cheng.

First, I agree with Cheng that the argument from illusions to indirect realism is controversial, especially as to what is meant by "realism," "veridical," and "sense data" and the background assumptions underlying them. I provide a finer specification of some of the sub-movements that were the specific concerns of my previous article, particularly phenomenology as it currently sees itself in perception research, and the relevance of illusions. Perception has turned out to be far more complex than traditional philosophy realized, as has been revealed by recent research in neuroscience and psychophysics. Lastly, I answer Cheng's question about the "causal exclusion argument" by suggesting it is obviated by the temporal substructure of metaphysical states, and I provide a detailed supporting case in Supplementary Material.

Illusions, objectivity, and non-reductive emergentism: Reply to Rose.

In the target article, David Rose makes an interesting and substantive case against a certain kind of sceptical view: "veridical perception is impossible in principle," combined with a certain version of anti-realism. He proceeds by first illustrating several ideas from George Orwell's seminal work, and then proposes that a certain kind of non-reductive, levelled emergentist metaphysics can help us respond to such scepticism. In this commentary, I join forces with Rose's case, but will point out that we need to take seriously two discussions in contemporary philosophy in order to make the realist case stronger: the argument from illusion and hallucination, and the causal exclusion argument. Only then do Rose and his allies can have a more satisfactory case for objectivity and realism.

EVOLUTION, ORIGINAL SIN, AND RACE

This issue's Symposium is dedicated to the topic of “Evolution, Original Sin, and the Fall,” with five articles and an introduction by the Symposium's guest editors, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt. As De Cruz and De Smedt point out, original sin and the Fall have taken a central place in Christian contributions to the religion and science discussion. The first two articles reflect on Aquinas, who is still central to the Roman Catholic tradition; the third article stems from the presbytarian tradition; and the fourth and fifth articles draw on literary science and sociology, respectively—this Symposium definitely includes an interesting mix of disciplines. Paul Macdonald shows how traditional Thomistic claims about the creation and fall of the first human beings—or “Adam”—are compatible with the claims of evolutionary science concerning human origins. He defends Aquinas's claims that God created Adam in a state or condition of original justice, wholly subject to God and so fully virtuous, as well as internally immune to bodily corruption, suffering, and natural death. Julie Loveland Swanstrom finds space in Aquinas's thinking for evolutionary thought. She argues that individual or original sin is an inadequate explanation for variation within kinds of creatures and she shows that the existence of argumentative parallels between Aquinas’s treatment of women and mules challenges presumptions about what medievals meant by “static kinds.” Hans Madueme maintains that although the search for a post-Darwinian doctrine of sin has prompted fascinating areas of research, coming up with an evolutionary theology of sin remains a remarkably difficult project. He critically surveys recent theodicies that aim to explain why evolution results in so much suffering. Austin Freeman argues that because God is the author of history and has a purpose for his creation, evolution has a plot and can be analyzed with tools drawn from literary criticism. He engages with the “epic of evolution” genre of scientific literature, distinguishing between a purely naturalistic epic of evolution and a goal-oriented Christian epic of evolution. Finally, Jack Mulder addresses ways in which one important view of racism parallels the Christian doctrine of original sin. Using an epistemology of ignorance, he argues that the dichotomy between two main strands of Christian thinking about original sin, Augustinian versus Irenaean, is short-sighted, and he proposes a model of original sin similar to an epistemology of racist ignorance. In this issue's Comment section, Daniel Lim offers a fresh comment on Mikael Leidenhag's (2019) article in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and on Leidenhag's (2020) response to an earlier comment. Lim critically assesses the way that Leidenhag uses Jaegwon Kim's work on causal exclusion to critique what he calls “Natural Divine Causation” (NDC). Although he agrees with Leidenhag that questions about divine action can fruitfully be posed in terms of Kim's so-called “Causal Exclusion Argument,” the technical way that this is done requires amendment. The comment provides new possibilities for those who wish to construe a noninterventionist picture of divine action based on emergence theory or nonreductive physicalism. This issue contains six contributions in the Articles section. John Calvin Chatlos proposes a “framework of spirituality” for the future of naturalism; this framework identifies part of the “unseen order” of religion as opening a “spiritual core” within persons as a source of healing and happiness. Libby Osgood delves into interpretations of Teilhard de Chardin, in order to address ecological eschatological questions; she disentangles the “nature of nature” in his work by distinguishing thirteen distinct definitions of “nature” that can be summarized into five categories. Harvey Cawdron develops a model of panentheism in which God's embodiment in the cosmos allows all, including all nonbelievers, to have a relationship with God; his model does not require subjects to recognize that they are in a relationship with God. Robbert Zandbergen writes about antinatalism—the conviction that existence is not intrinsically more valuable than nonexistence—and the “death of God”; he describes how antinatalism is the most modern outgrowth of the death of God and represents the most radical face of secular humanism. Hussein Ali Agrama discusses the reports and results of recent official studies of UFOs and argues they may pose a challenge to contemporary science, religion, and secularity; current knowledge on UFOs renders both science and religion uncanny, placing them in a domain where they become irreducibly strange while unshakably familiar. Lari Launonen calls out “debunking arguments”—that belief-forming processes underlying belief in supernatural agents are unreliable—based solely on cognitive science of religion; he highlights that in conjunction with claims about evolutionary epistemology and religious diversity, cognitive science of religion can provide an explanation of why people might believe in gods even if gods did not exist. The issue ends with Lluis Oviedo's review of Gavin Flood's Religion and the Philosophy of Life.

NATURAL DIVINE CAUSATION, CAUSAL EXCLUSION, AND OVERDETERMINATION: COMMENT ON MIKAEL LEIDENHAG

AbstractIn his article “The Blurred Line between Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design” and his response “The Problem of Natural Divine Causation and the Benefits of Partial Causation”, Mikael Leidenhag uses Jaegwon Kim's work on causal exclusion to critique what he calls “Natural Divine Causation” (NDC). Although I agree with Leidenhag that questions about divine action can fruitfully be posed in terms of Kim's so‐called Causal Exclusion Argument, I take issue with the way he attempts to carry out this task and the reasons he offers against the overdetermination response to the Causal Exclusion Argument.

Do reasons drain away?

This paper offers a defense against the primary objection to the view that goodness and other value properties give normative reasons, which is T. M. Scanlon’s influential redundancy argument. Scanlon reasons that value properties cannot add anything over and above what non-evaluative properties contribute. I suggest this line of reasoning is analogous to Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument against non-reductive physicalism, and adapt Ned Block’s objection to exclusion—a generalization and regress argument—into a reason for rejecting Scanlon’s argument. Differences between reasons and causes make Scanlon’s task more difficult than Kim’s.

Physicalism without identity

Abstract This paper presents and discusses the most influential attempts to characterize physicalism without postulating relations of identity between the physical and the prima facie non-physical. The first section deals with a possible criticism that these attempts are misguided, since they contradict the physicalist slogan “everything there is physical.” In the second section, I elucidate the different formulations of the physicalist supervenience claim, and argue that none of them consists in an adequate characterization of physicalism. Three reasons are given in favor of this conclusion: their compatibility with forms of dualism (or pluralism); the fact that the supervenience relation is left unexplained; and Kim’s causal exclusion argument, which asserts that merely supervenient entities (i.e., ones that are not in identity relations with strictly physical entities) must be epiphenomenal. The third section presents the general features of another identity-independent attempt to characterize physicalism, namely realization physicalism. According to this view, tokens of prima facie non-physical types are realized by tokens of strictly physical types performing functional roles that specify the nature of the former. The third section also shows how realization physicalism deals with the objections that make physicalist supervenience claims inadequate for characterizing physicalism.

Strengthening the exclusion argument

As conceived by Kim, the causal exclusion argument targets all forms of nonreductive physicalism equally, but by restricting its focus to functionalist varieties of nonreductivism, I am able to develop a version of the argument that has a number of virtues lacking in the original. First, the revised argument has no need for Kim’s causal exclusion principle, which many find dubious if not simply false. Second, the revised argument can be adapted to either a production-based conception of causation, as Kim himself favors, or to any of a number of dependence-based conceptions, like the ones favored by many of Kim’s critics. And, finally, the revised argument does not have the objectionable consequence that all so-called higher-level properties are epiphenomenal, for it does not generalize in the way that Kim’s original version of the argument arguably does. Nor does it concede much to narrow the scope of the argument in the way proposed. Those who adopt nonreductive theories of mind do so, by and large, on the strength of functionalist arguments for the multiple realizability of mental states. If functionalism entails that mental properties are epiphenomenal, this thus deals a critical, if not quite fatal, blow to nonreductivism.

Abstract Objects, Causal Efficacy, and Causal Exclusion

Abstract objects are standardly taken to be causally inert, but this claim is rarely explicitly argued for. In the context of his platonism about musical works, in order for musical works to be audible, Julian Dodd argues that abstracta are causally efficacious in virtue of their concrete tokens participating in events. I attempt to provide a principled argument for the causal inertness of abstracta by first rejecting Dodd’s arguments from events, and then extending and generalizing the causal exclusion argument to the abstract/concrete distinction. For reasons of parsimony, if concrete tokens or instantiations of abstract objects account for all causal work, then there is no reason to attribute causal efficacy to abstracta, and thus reason to maintain their causal inertness. I then consider how one of the main arguments against causal exclusion, namely Stephen Yablo’s notion of “proportionality”, could be modified to support the causal efficacy of abstracta. I argue that from a few simple premises Yablo’s account in fact supports their causal inertness. Having a principled reason for the causal inertness of abstracta appears to entail that the musical platonist must admit that we never literally hear the musical work, but only its performances. I sketch a solution to this problem available to Dodd, so that the musical platonist can maintain that musical works are abstract objects and are causally inert while retaining their audibility.

Manipulationism and causal exclusion

A new way of avoiding the causal exclusion argument in the context of manipulationism is proposed. In manipulationism, causal explanations are defined by counterfactual information accessed through manipulations. It is argued that the property of manipulability can be an emergent property of aggregate systems. Therefore, some causal explanations are non-reducible and causal exclusion is avoided. This emergentist notion of causal explanation addresses the question of how the special sciences can be based upon causal reasoning, even if fundamental physics is absent of causal relations.

Experiment, Downward Causation, and Interventionist Levels of Explanation

ABSTRACTThis article considers interventionist arguments for downward causation and non-fundamental level causal explanation from the point of view of inferring causation from experiments. Several authors have utilised the interventionist theory of causal explanation to argue that the causal exclusion argument is moot and that higher-level as well as downward causation is real. I show that this argument can be made when levels are understood as levels of grain, leaving us with a choice between causal explanations pitched at different levels. Causal proportionality has been suggested as a principle for choosing the correct level of description for causal explanations, but this suggestion has serious problems. I offer an alternative principle, based on the idea that explanations should track actual difference-makers. I then consider claims about systems causally influencing their own parts. Such claims risk conceptual confusion for the same reason as the exclusion argument, by conflating causal and constitutive dependencies. The distinction between causation and constitution is used to give criteria for the correct use of the idea of downward causation.

How To Get Rid of Closure

Sophie Gibb has recently invented a very interesting strategy against Kim’s causal exclusion argument. This strategy adopts the powers theory of causation and an interpretation of mental causation in terms of double prevention. Gibb’s strategy results both in invalidating the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain in most of its formulations and in disarming the argument in question. In my paper, I present a general procedure for the opponents of reductive physicalism which enables them to grapple successfully with the mentioned principle. I also argue that although it could be possible to adopt Gibb’s strategy as a part of this procedure, there is a simpler one to obtain a similar outcome. This strategy is mainly based on Uwe Meixner’s causal argument against physicalism and it leads to the conclusion that if one accepts the principle of sufficient cause ( i.e. the principle of sufficient reason in its causal variant), then one should reject the principle of causal closure in the light of some empirical data. This alternative proposal is more attractive than Gibb’s solution, since it is independent of any conception of causation, does not make any distinction between causal relevance and causal efficacy, and does not refer to the notion of double prevention .

Interventionism and Supervenience: A New Problem and Provisional Solution

The causal exclusion argument suggests that mental causes are excluded in favour of the underlying physical causes that do all the causal work. Recently, a debate has emerged concerning the possibility of avoiding this conclusion by adopting Woodward's interventionist theory of causation. Both proponents and opponents of the interventionist solution crucially rely on the notion of supervenience when formulating their positions. In this article, we consider the relation between interventionism and supervenience in detail and argue that importing supervenience relations into the interventionist framework is deeply problematic. However, rather than reject interventionist solutions to exclusion wholesale, we wish to propose that the problem lies with the concept of supervenience. This would open the door for a moderate defence of the interventionist solution to the exclusion argument.

Interventions on causal exclusion

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects.

On the Distinction Between Cause-Cause Exclusion and Cause-Supervenience Exclusion

This paper is concerned with the connection between the causal exclusion argument and the supervenience argument and, in particular, with two exclusion principles that figure prominently in these arguments. Our aim is, first, to reconstruct the dialectics of the two arguments by formalizing them and by relating them to an anti-physicalist argument by Scott Sturgeon. In a second step, we assess the conclusiveness of the two arguments. We demonstrate that the conclusion of both the causal exclusion argument and the supervenience argument (a negation of the so called ‘non-identity premise’) is not tantamount to the claim that all mental events are identical to physical events and that a cause-supervenience exclusion principle is actually required for the validity of the first stage of the supervenience argument. Moreover, we show that this new exclusion principle makes an epiphenomenalism with respect to mental events an impossible position, and that there are good reasons to believe in its falsity, rendering the supervenience argument inconclusive.

Does the Interventionist Notion of Causation Deliver Us from the Fear of Epiphenomenalism?

This article reviews the causal exclusion argument and confronts it with some recently proposed refutations based on the interventionist account of causation. I first show that there are several technical and interpretative difficulties in applying the interventionist account to the exclusion issue. Different ways of accommodating the two to one another are considered and all are shown to leave the issue without a fully satisfactory resolution. Lastly, I argue that, on the most consistent construal, the interventionist approach can provide grounds for thinking that higher-level causal notions are as legitimate as lower-level causal notions, but it does not provide grounds for postulating inter-level causal interactions.

Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.

Two Myths of Psychophysical Reductionism

This paper focuses on two prominent arguments claiming that physicalism entails reductionism. One is Kim’s causal exclusion argument (CEA), and the other is Papineau’s causal argument. The paper argues that Kim’s CEA is not logically valid and that it is driven by two implausible justifications. One is “Edward’s dictum”, which is alien to non-reductive physicalism and should be rejected. The other is by endorsement of Papineau’s conception of the physical, immanent in Papineau’s causal argument. This argument only arrives at the physical property-property identities by using a conception of the physical that licenses anything to be reductively physical, including putative core anti-physical entities; thus, leaving Papineau’s causal argument and Kim’s CEA without a reductive physicalist conclusion of philosophical interest.