(PDF) Mental Causation and the Paradoxes of Explanation

Mental causation is a problem and not just a problem for the nonphysicalist. One of the many lessons learned from Jaegwon Kim’s writings in the philosophy of mind is that mental causation is a problem for the nonreductive physicalist as well. A central component of the common sense picture we have of ourselves as persons is that our beliefs and desires causally explain our actions. But the completeness of the “brain sciences” threatens this picture. If all of our actions are causally explained by neurophysiological events occurring in our brains, what causal role is left for our reasons and motives? It would seem that these brain events do all the causal work there is to do, thus robbing the mental of its efficacy altogether or else making it a merely superfluous or redundant causal factor. This essay presents a systematic treatment of this exclusion dilemma from the perspective of a nonreductive physicalist. I argue that both horns of this dilemma can be avoided if we ground mental causation in counterfactual dependence between distinct events and understand the mind-body relation as event realization. Although in the final analysis our actions are overdetermined by their mental and neurophysiological antecedents, this overdetermination is entirely unproblematic.

Forthcoming in Ratio. Please cite published version. According to a popular model of mental causation, an irreducible mental cause M1 brings about an irreducible mental effect M2 by bringing about M2’s supervenience base (ground, realizer, etc.), P2. Call this ‘the Downward Causation View’. This paper raises doubts about the Downward Causation View on grounds that M1 does not cause M2 immediately and there is no causal chain from M1 to M2. Prima facie, then, M1 does not cause M2 on this view. But a theory of mental causation ought to account for how some mental phenomena cause other mental phenomena; so rival theories are to be preferred. After setting out the problem, I consider replies; all fail.

If we accept causal exclusion, property dualism and physical determinism, mental epiphenomenalism follows. According to Yablo (1992), we can save mental causation by rejecting causal exclusion and considering the mental/physical relation as an instance of the determinable/determinate relation. In this paper I examine Crane’s argument (2008) against the causal relevance of determinables, and I argue that we still have good reasons to think that determinables may be causally efficacious. As mental properties can be also considered as exhaustive disjunctions of physical realizers, the causal relevance of mental properties is also questioned by the widely shared opinion that disjunctive properties can not be causally efficacious. I consider Clapp’s arguments (2001) in favor of the causal relevance of disjunctive properties, and I conclude that disjunctive properties may survive both Armstrong’s famous objections (1978).

UNCORRECTED PROOF! KARSTEN R. STUEBER MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION ABSTRACT. In this paper I will discuss Kim’s powerful explanatory exclusion argument against the causal efficacy of mental properties. Baker and Burge misconstrue Kim’s challenge if they understand it as being based on a purely metaphysical understanding of causation that has no grounding in an epistemological analysis of our successful scientific practices. As I will show, the emphasis on explanatory practices can only be effective in answering Kim if it is understood as being part of the dual-explanandum strategy. Furthermore, a fundamental problem of the contemporary debate about mental causation consists in the fact that all sides take very different examples to be paradigmatic for the relation between psychological and neurobiological explanations. Even if we should expect some alignment in the explanatory scope of neurobiology and psychology/folk-psychology, there is no reason to expect that all mental explanations are exempted by physical explanations, since they do not in general explain the same phenomena. INTRODUCTION Due to the influential arguments of Donald Davidson, philosophers generally accept the claim that one has to conceive of reasons as causes and that one has to regard psychological explanations as causal explanations. Despite this agreement there is, however, still no consensus about how such a causal conception of mentality is justified within a contemporary physicalistic framework. Even though hardly anybody accepts Cartesian substance dualism, we still have difficulty in accounting for the causal efficacy of mental properties. A merely cursory look at the recent debate about mental causation could leave the impression that we seem to be condemned to conceive of mental states as causes for actions without being able to philosophically comprehend such a conception. Our best philosophical arguments provide prima facie strong reasons for the claim that mental properties can have only epiphenomenal status. Philosophical Studies 00: 1–35, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. WEB2C PDF-OP Disk, CP VICTORY: PIPS No.: 5149227 (philkap:humsfam) v.1.2 phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.1 2 KARSTEN R. STUEBER But this is a conclusion we cannot live with since it contradicts our self-conception as responsible agents.1 The above difficulty stems from the fact that mental properties, whether they are phenomenal or intentional properties, are for various reasons not reducible to specific physical or neurobiological properties of a specific organism. Reasons most often cited for nonreducibility are the multiple realizability of mental properties, the non-individualistic constitution of mental content and the so-called anomaly of the mental. In this article, I will take the non-reducibility of mental properties and the non-individualistic character of mental content for granted. I will rather focus on what I regard to be the central challenge any non-reductionist physicalist has to meet: Kim’s argument against the causal efficacy and causal relevance of mental properties based on the principle of explanatory exclusion. In the first section, I will outline the precise structure of this powerful argument and its presupposition. The most promising response to Kim’s challenge is, in my opinion, to be found in Baker and Burge’s proposal to think about the causal efficacy of specific properties in the context of established scientific and commonsensical explanatory practices. However, as I will argue in the second section, their attack on Kim’s argument is to a certain extent misguided. Kim’s challenge is misconstrued if one understands it as being based on a purely pre-Kantian metaphysical conception of causation that is “done in total isolation from epistemology.”2 I will argue that the emphasis on explanatory practices can only be effective in countering Kim’s challenge if it is understood as being part of the so called dual-explanandum strategy, i.e. the claim that different phenomena are explained within the explanatory schemes of psychology and physical sciences, including neurobiology.3 Similarly, various attempts to argue for the compatibility of psychological and “physical” explanation of behavior by pointing to the autonomy of psychological generalizations or counterfactuals should be seen in this manner. Kim has some sympathy for the dual explanandum strategy but he is worried about whether the causal-explanatory role of mental properties can be regarded as truly autonomous or whether it is not merely “piggy-backing” on the underlying neurobiological mechanisms.4 Nevertheless, merely raising this question is not sufficient to put the metaphysical phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.2 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 3 integrity of established explanatory practices into doubt. I will suggest that the scope of the causal inheritance principle, which grounds Kim’s worries about “piggybacking,” is limited to certain explanatory contexts. As I will show, it does not apply to all psychological explanations, since the contextual and social factors that are constitutive for their explananda involve essentially a mental dimension. Furthermore, social and intentional categories have a wide historical supervenience base that does not map smoothly onto the causal mechanisms that do the explanatory work for the lower level sciences. There is thus no reason to expect that the causal-explanatory character of mental properties can be generally accounted for in terms of the underlying physical mechanisms, even if we should expect some realignment in the explanatory scopes of neurobiology and psychology or folk-psychology. 1. THE EXPLANATORY EXCLUSION ARGUMENT Kim’s challenge to mental causation within the framework of nonreductive physicalism can be reconstructed in the following manner. He argues that the following six assumptions form an inconsistent set. For the purpose of this discussion, I will articulate his argument in terms of explanation and not only in terms of causation.5 1. The thesis of explanatory realism: a. Explanations are grounded in and true because of objective and mind-independent relations between events in the real world. A causal explanation of an event E by reference to event C is only true if there exists a real causal relation between C and E that is independent of our explanatory practices.6 b. Causal relations between events C and E hold in virtue of certain properties. A causal explanation of event E in terms of C is true only if it cites the properties in virtue of which C causes E. 2. Psychological explanations are causal explanations. Mental properties fulfill a real causal explanatory role. 3. We provide sometimes causal psychological explanations for bodily movements. For example, we explain why somebody phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.3 4 KARSTEN R. STUEBER raises his hand by referring to his desire to be noticed or by mentioning the pain he is in. Similarly we explain why somebody climbs a ladder by saying that he wanted to retrieve his hat. 4. By 1–3 one is committed to the existence of psychophysical causation, i.e. to the claim that “an event, in virtue of its mental property, causes another event to have a certain physical property.”7 5. The principle of physical closure: “Any physical event that has a cause at time t has a physical cause at t . . ., i.e. if we trace the causal ancestry of a physical event, we need never go outside the physical domain.”8 It follows that each event and its physical properties have a complete explanation within the physical domain. Our physical theory of the physical domain is therefore complete and self-sufficient. 6. Causal overdetermination cannot be accepted as providing us with a general picture of the relationship between mental and physical causation. It would imply that if the “physical cause hadn’t occurred, the mental cause by itself would have caused the effect.”9 This however would violate physical closure, besides endowing the mental with mystical powers. (5.) and (6.) however contradict the assumptions (1.)–(4.) If a physical explanation provides a complete causal explanation of a specific physical event and if overdetermination is not an option, then we cannot accept another mental explanation as being objectively true. Within the context of explanatory realism a complete explanation places an event uniquely within the causal nexus of the world. For that reason there cannot be two complete and independent explanations of the same event. Accordingly, one cannot accept a psychological story about how the specific physical event occurred as an objective explanation of this event. The possibility of a sufficient and complete physical explanation preempts the causal objectivity of mental explanations. Non-reductive physicalists can’t have their cake and eat it too. Kim also suggests that one can accept the explanatory exclusion argument for merely epistemic reasons, i.e. even if one rejects the thesis of explanatory realism. According to this line of reasoning, explanations are supposed to provide a certain unity of knowledge phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.4 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 5 by connecting various items in our experience. Given this function of unification, one cannot accept two complete explanations for the same phenomenon without creating a certain tension in one’s world view. This tension can only be resolved through a plausible account of how these explanations are related to each other.10 However, a merely epistemic understanding of the concept of explanation is not necessarily committed to conceiving of explanations as unifying all domains of knowledge. The explanatory exclusion argument could not get off the ground, if one understands explanation as an intensional, context-sensitive, and interest-relative notion. One could even combine such an understanding of explanation with the acceptance of (1a.) in the context of conceiving of causal relations as extensional relations between concrete events. What is crucial for generating the exclusion problem is acceptance of (1b.), i.e. the claim that C causes E in virtue of certain properties. A defender of Davidson’s anomalous monism would however deny the truth of exactly this premise.11 Such a philosopher (i) asserts a token-identity between mental events and physical events, (ii) claims that only physical laws can be strict and (iii) maintains a nomological conception of causation, i.e. events are causally related only if they can be subsumed under some strict laws. Furthermore, he espouses a nominalistic conception of properties and is at pains to stress that causal relations do not hold in virtue of any properties, physical or mental. Properties do not play any genuine causal role but are only explanatorily relevant depending on the specific explanatory context. As Davidson himself emphasizes, the acceptability of an explanation depends on the conceptual resources that we use to formulate them. Here lies the crucial difference between explanations and singular causal statements. It is, for example, perfectly in order to say that the event described on the front page of the NY Times caused the event described on the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, but we could not provide an explanation for the occurrence of these events under such a description. Explanations are successful not only because they succeed in identifying causal relations between certain events but because they identify such events in terms of concepts that play a role in the formulation of strict or non-strict lawlike generalizations. Both physical and psychological descriptions are therefore explanatorily relevant phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.5 6 KARSTEN R. STUEBER since both of them allow us to formulate such generalizations, even if psychological properties do not function in strict laws. Psychological explanations also have an autonomous status vis-à-vis physical explanations. They allow us to see regularities that cannot be recognized otherwise since the intentional idiom is not reducible to the physical idiom. From this perspective, the existence of two explanations for a single phenomenon does not create any epistemic discomfort. Since explanations are relativized to contexts and there is not just one such context, one should rather expect a multiplicity of explanations. An explanatory contextualist does not have to deny that explanations create some epistemic unity within one context, but he would insist that they do not create unity across different explanatory contexts. It should, therefore, not be surprising that we might have different explanations of the same phenomenon in different contexts. Even though such a position is internally consistent, its conception of the relation between causation and causal explanation is highly problematic. The assumption that causal relations hold in virtue of certain properties is a metaphysically plausible one, since it is supported by our scientific practices.12 Strictly speaking within the Davidsonian framework we could not ask for an explanation of why event C caused event E as we ordinarily do, since events do not cause each other in virtue of anything. We could only ask for an explanation of why event C occurred in the sense of asking which of the many events that happened prior to C caused C to occur. Yet this is certainly a distortion of our scientific practices. Medical researchers, for example, are not only interested in explaining why peptic ulcers occur by merely pointing to the presence of Helicobacter pylori. They are also interested in finding out how and why H pylori bacteria are able to cause ulcers in the stomach. Indeed, as Paul Thagard has shown, understanding the underlying mechanism of this causal relation has been a salient factor for accepting the bacterial theory of peptic ulcers in the medical community.13 Our metaphysical intuitions, as sanctioned by our explanatory practices thus support a position of explanatory realism as specified in premises (1a) and (1b). Accordingly, we cannot point to the context relativity of explanations in order to account for a multiplicity of explanations of the same phenomenon. We would need an account phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.6 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 7 of how these various objective properties are related to each other. Yet it is important to recognize that the epistemic tension between two explanations is created only in light of certain metaphysical assumptions about the causal order of the world. Since these assumptions are plausible, we need to address Kim’s explanatory exclusion argument, in order to account for mental causation and the autonomy of psychological explanations. Kim is nowadays rather skeptical about his earlier attempts to account for the explanatory objectivity of psychological explanations in terms of supervenient causation, since within this model each supervening mental property is causally efficacious only because of its supervenience base and psychological explanations still seem to be objectively preempted by physical explanations.14 Of course, within the context of traditional identity theory the above problems would not have arisen. In that scenario, a mental property could be identified with a physical property and no violation of the physical closure principle would occur.15 In light of the multiple realization arguments articulated by functionalists, the traditional type-type identity theory cannot be defended. Nevertheless, Kim suggests that we can only overcome the problem of mental causation and the causal-explanatory exclusion problem if it is possible to argue for a more limited form of local reduction, i.e. an identification of a mental property with a physical property relative to a particular species or an even more localized and fine-grained reduction.16 Crucial for such a local reduction is the functionalization of mental properties, i.e. the definition of a mental property in terms of its “causal/nomic relations to other properties.”17 Such a functionalization would allow us to identify a mental property with a physical property, which has the same functional role, without making such talk of identification merely ad hoc. Kim is quite aware of the fact that such functionalization does not seem to be plausible for phenomenal mental properties. Yet he is persuaded that such functionalization should be in principle possible for intentional properties because intentionality supervenes logically on the physical structure of the world. It is thus “inconceivable that a possible world exists that is an exact physical duplicate of this world but lacking wholly in intentionality.”18 phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.7 8 KARSTEN R. STUEBER Unlike Kim, I am however doubtful that accepting such global supervenience forces me automatically to believe in the functionalization of intentional properties in any formal and precise manner and in a way that will honor our folk-psychological conception of mental content. It seems to me perfectly reasonable to insist that our practice of ascribing intentional properties contains an irreducible pragmatic and non-formalizable element,19 while recognizing that our common sense conception of intentionality also honors the above supervenience intuition. We need therefore a more elaborate proposal in order to justify the hope that a functionalization of intentional properties can be carried out. A natural candidate for the functionalization of content properties is conceptual role semantics. Yet as Fodor and LePore have pointed out, if conceptual role semantics identifies the content of a mental representation with its inferential role within the cognitive system of an individual, then, assuming the impossibility of an analytic/synthetic distinction, each difference in inferential role has to count as a semantic difference. Two individuals can only share one belief if they share all beliefs, which as a matter of fact never seems to be the case. (Notice also that this is not only a problem for folk-psychological wide content, but also for a notion of narrow content, at least within the context of functionalism.) This would imply that general scientific or folkpsychological explanation of human beings in terms of intentional states would be impossible since in that case “there are no robust counterfactual-supporting generalizations.”20 Whether or not we are able to replace the notion of sameness of content with a suitable notion of similarity of content that is able to overcome the above objection is at this stage however still an open question. Teleofunctional theories constitute another option for the reductionist project. Yet they are, I believe, also not able to overcome the problem of the indeterminacy of conceptual content and they are until now not able to identify the content of a mental representation with the specificity required for the content of a de dicto belief. These last claims about the difficulties facing the prospect of trying to reduce intentionality require certainly a much more detailed argument, but they suggest that we cannot take the possibility of a reduction of intentional properties for granted. If reduction turns out to be impossible and we cannot answer the explanatory exclusion argu- phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.8 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 9 ment, our only option would be an instrumentalist understanding of our mentalistic explanation of behavior. From my perspective it is therefore more promising to account for the autonomy and causal efficacy of mental properties without demanding a reduction.21 I will argue for such a non-reductive account in the following pages. 2. THE FLIGHT FROM METAPHYSICS INTO THE EPISTEMOLOGIES OF EXPLANATORY PRACTICES If the argument in the above section is correct then the problem of mental causation seems to be intractable within the context of physicalism. In light of this conclusion, one is indeed justified to wonder whether something has gone wrong with the above argument. For Baker and Burge, the above conclusion should be better understood as an argument against the metaphysical framework of physicalism. Both take a Moorean attitude towards the problem of mental causation. It is more certain that psychological explanations are objective causal explanations than that the metaphysical framework which casts doubt on the reality of mental causation is correct.22 For them, it is wrong to evaluate the objectivity of psychological explanations according to a conception of causality that is not derived from the explanatory practice of the special sciences but is based on a certain materialistic prejudice. A conception of causation can be justified only insofar as it conforms to our successful explanatory practices.23 To say it more succinctly, Baker and Burge diagnose the obsession of contemporary philosophy with the problem of mental causation as a failure to have learned Kant’s lesson that metaphysics requires epistemology. Baker and Burge argue for their diagnosis by pointing out that Kim’s argument would not only put the objectivity of psychological explanations into doubt. It would also challenge the explanatory relevance of all the other special sciences, since even neurobiology or geology are not completely causally closed. Causal closure is only valid for the microphysical reality described by physics and quantum mechanics. If one accepts the causal closure of the physical in this sense it would mean that any physical event has a complete micro-physical cause and explanation. And then one could construe an argument that would show that all causal relations postulated phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.9 10 KARSTEN R. STUEBER in the special sciences like geology, chemistry, and neurobiology etc. lack objective existence. Instead of accepting such absurd consequences Baker rejects the causal closure principle.24 Burge on the other hand seems to accept the closure principle for the physical realm but he insists that it does not follow that such a closed system “overrides causal relations or causal explanation in terms of properties from outside the system, ” especially if mental and physical explanations answer “two very different types of inquiry.”25 Burge thus seems to reject the principle of explanatory exclusion. As we have seen in the first section, a certain epistemic conception of explanation, which also emphasizes its context relativity, does not have to worry about the causal/explanatory exclusion argument. Yet both Baker and Burge seem to argue for the causal efficacy of mental properties. Burge claims explicitly that psychological and physical explanations “are explaining the same physical effect as the outcome of two very different patterns of events.”26 In this case, we need to explicate why two independent explanations of the same phenomenon can be both accepted as objectively true. However, the worry of whether the causal efficacy of mental properties is preempted by neurobiological and physical properties is independent of the problem of whether or not Kim’s exclusion argument generalizes to all macroscopic properties postulated by the special sciences or even to all properties as Block suggests.27 One might be able to address the generalization problem without having answered the question of why mental properties should be regarded as having autonomous causal powers. For that purpose it might be sufficient to acknowledge as Kim has recently done that certain macro-properties have non-reducible causal powers, “powers that go beyond the causal powers of their micro-constituents.”28 For Kim such acknowledgment is compatible with his general physicalistic commitments, because such properties are micro-based and can be completely characterized in terms of their microstructure. They are completely analyzable into their parts and the relations between these parts without their causal powers “draining” – to use Block’s metaphor – to the next lower level. The mass of a large object, for example, can be completely accounted for in terms of the mass of its micro-constituents. Yet as anybody knows, who had a heavy object falling on his foot, its mass has causal powers that go beyond phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.10 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 11 the causal powers of its constituents. Kim also insists that the relation between mental and neurobiological properties does not track the distinction between micro-macro levels.29 Mental and neurobiological properties are properties of a person and they should therefore be regarded as belonging to the same ontological level. For that very reason they are still within the scope of the causal explanatory exclusion argument. It is not important to decide in this context whether or not Kim’s response is ultimately successful in answering his critics that he has as much difficulties to account for ordinary macro-causation as for mental causation.30 His response indicates however that the generalization problem has to be distinguished from the specific problem of mental causation we are focusing on in this article. One can also support this conclusion on a more intuitive basis. One only needs to assume that our account of bodily movements is explanatorily and causally closed insofar as neurobiology, chemistry and physics are concerned. This seems to be a reasonable assumption in light of our contemporary scientific practices. If this assumption is granted, however, the explanatory exclusion problem as elaborated in the prior section arises. Consequently, Baker and Burge are wrong to claim that Kim adheres to a pre-Kantian conception of how one should do metaphysics. One rather should understand Kim’s concerns as being based on a plausible conception of explanation and on certain metaphysical assumptions that are indeed basic presuppositions of our scientific practices. Within these practices we accept, for example, that physics has a certain distinguished status insofar as its scope is universal and it describes the most basic causal processes constituting the universe. It is therefore unfair to depict Kim’s concerns as being raised outside the realm of epistemology and of our successful scientific practices. He is better understood as pointing to difficulties and inconsistencies within the context of our explanatory practices. Kim is justified in insisting on the metaphysical question of how we can conceive of mental causation as being possible.31 Nevertheless, if these metaphysical worries arise within the context of our explanatory practices, then they are also constrained by the parameter of these practices. As I will argue in the next section, we should take worries about epiphenomenalism seriously, phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.11 12 KARSTEN R. STUEBER only if they can be substantiated within the context of the same explanatory practices that give rise to these worries. We have to have reasons to believe that, given the way that our various explanatory practices individuate causal efficacious properties and their explananda, explanations of one practice make other explanations superfluous. In arguing for the dual explanandum strategy, I will suggest that this is not very likely. On the other hand, epiphenomenalist worries from a God’s eye perspective, in light of a unified science – “we do not know what” – do not qualify as serious metaphysical doubts. The adequate philosophical response in regard to such worries is neglect. 3. THE DUAL EXPLANANDUM STRATEGY AND THE CAUSAL INHERITANCE PRINCIPLE For that very reason, there is something right about Baker and Burge’s insistence that in order to understand questions about causation and explanations one has primarily to focus on our successful explanatory practices. Certain conceptual resources and different ways of formulating and answering why-questions define explanatory practices. They are able to identify different autonomous counterfactual patterns or ceteris paribus laws that are at least prima facie indicative of the autonomous causal power of higher order properties. To quote Terry Horgan as a representative of this position: On this generic approach, causal claims and causal explanations at different levels of description do not directly compete with each other, because they advert to different, but equally real and objective, dependency-patterns among properties. Which pattern is contextually relevant depends on one’s specific interests and purposes in asking for the cause or for a causal explanation.32 Because of these different conceptual resources constitutive for the special sciences we also cannot expect to provide a causal explanation for an economic or social fact by appealing to the conceptual resources of physics or even neurobiology.33 Within the realm of physics one cannot even articulate the question and problems for which one is trying to find an economic explanation. As has often been pointed out, the conceptual resources of the different sciences criss-cross each other. phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.12 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 13 Nevertheless, it is important to note that merely recognizing different levels of counterfactual dependence alone is insufficient to counter the above explanatory exclusion argument. Merely asserting a difference between levels still does not show us how we should think of the relation between mental and physical/neurobiological properties, especially if one agrees as Burge does that psychological and physical/neurobiological explanations explain in general the exact same phenomenon. The counterfactual approach to the problem of mental causation is therefore more plausible if one interprets it as part of the so called dual-explanandum strategy, i.e. the claim that psychological explanations do not in general attempt to explain the same phenomenon or aspects of the same phenomenon as physical or neurobiological explanations.34 As a first step of my defense of the dual explanandum strategy, one has to recognize that Kim distorts the relation between the scope of neurobiological and psychological explanations by focusing primarily on the explanations of specific bodily movements. Psychological explanations, at least ordinary belief/desire explanations normally play a vital role in a much broader context as in the explanation of actions in a specific historical, economic or social environment. One is, for example, able to explain the build up of the German Navy before World War I by pointing to Kaiser Wilhelm’s desire for a place in the sun and his belief that a strong German Navy would enable him to acquire such a desired location and by assuming some rudimentary knowledge of the social and political structure of the German society at the time. Obviously, the build up of the German Navy involves a great amount of bodily movements. Yet a neurobiological explanation of each and every of these bodily movements does not provide an explanation for the build up of the German Navy. From a neurobiological point of view one is not even able to distinguish between the build up of the German and the British Navy. Here then is the paradox of psychological explanation that is created by Kim. His argument suggests that psychological explanations do not have any objective status because they are in competition with and excluded by neurobiological explanations of behavior. On the other hand neurobiological explanations do not answer the same why questions and they do not satisfy the same explana- phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.13 14 KARSTEN R. STUEBER tory interests as psychological explanations. But if explanations are answers to specific why questions that are grounded in objective relations then Kim seems to leave us the choice between neurobiological statements, which describe objective relations but do not answer the why questions we are interested in, and psychological explanations, which answer our why questions but do not seem to describe objective relations. This is not an appealing choice. In light of the above example it should be clear what has gone wrong with Kim’s argument. The purpose of a psychological explanation does not in general consist in explaining bodily movements as such but it explains the successful or unsuccessful interaction of organisms with their natural, historical and cultural environment. In that respect psychological explanations are similar to explanations of behavior within evolutionary biology. The evolutionary biologist is not interested in explaining certain bodily movements of the beaver but he is interested in explaining the dam building behavior, i.e. a certain interaction between the organism and the environment.35 There is, however, no systematic relationship between the type of bodily movement and the kind of effect it has in any environment. Rather different bodily movements can have the same effect in similar contexts, and depending on the environment the same bodily movement can have different effects in different environments. One can therefore not expect that neurobiology, which is supposedly able to provide a complete explanation of bodily movements, explains the successful interaction with the environment, even if a particular bodily movement brings about such an interaction. Neurobiological explanations thus do not exclude psychological explanations because they do not explain the same phenomena or they at least do not explain the same aspect of the same phenomena. Kim might even agree with the above claim that neurobiological explanations are primarily useful for the explanation of behavior narrowly described, that is, without taking into account its role in the larger environment.36 Yet he might ask, if we can explain all the bodily movements involved in a human activity, such as the activity to climb a ladder or to build a ship, what more do we need to know in order to describe the causal powers effective for enabling a person to climb a ladder or to build a ship? Neurobiology does not neces- phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.14 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 15 sarily limit its theoretical scope to specific social environments, but it can certainly be used for explaining bodily movements in such environments. If this is the case, why should one not conceive of the causal powers of mental properties as “piggybacking” on the causal powers of neural states that are described in neurobiology? Or to say it differently, if one accepts, as it is certainly plausible within the physicalistic framework, that each psychological explanation requires some physical implementing mechanism, why is it not the case that the psychological properties inherit their causal powers merely from the physical properties of the implementing mechanism? For Kim these considerations commit us to accepting the socalled causal inheritance principle, which I articulate for the purposes of this article in the following manner: (CIP) The causal powers of an instance of a psychological/mental property M are identical with all or a subset of the causal powers of the instance of the physical properties {P1 . . . Pn } that constitute its realizing or implementing mechanism. To reject the causal inheritance principle seems to imply that the causal powers of mental properties somehow “magically emerge at a higher level and of which there is no accounting in terms of lowerlevel properties and their causal powers and nomic connections.”37 And as Kim, in my opinion, rightly complains, what is the guarantee that the above case does not exemplify the general relationship between psychological and neurobiological explanations, i.e. what justifies the claim that counterfactual relations in the psychological vocabulary do not pick out merely epiphenomenal relations, that are grounded in the underlying physical mechanism? Proponents of the counterfactual approach to mental causation, which I utilize here for the dual explanandum strategy, differ in their reactions to the above worries. Baker responds by espousing a position of practical realism, according to which the commonsense conception of reality has “its own integrity” because commonsense categories are concerned with human flourishing and the attempt to satisfy non-optional human interests.38 For that very reason a “vertical integration of knowledge,” even though it would be welcomed, is neither “necessary nor common.”39 Marras, who explicitly defends a dual explanandum strategy, seems to be persuaded by the general plausibility of Kim’s causal inheritance phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.15 16 KARSTEN R. STUEBER principle and claims that “to ascribe causal powers to a property is, in general, to posit the existence of physical mechanisms through which systems instantiating that property discharge their causal power. The mechanisms explain the causal powers of the property, they do not preempt them or displace them.”40 Similarly, Antony and Levine require that autonomous higher order causal explanations are true only in virtue of “mechanisms that are ultimately grounded in the basic properties and objects of fundamental physics.”41 Yet they insist that knowledge of such metaphysical grounding is not required for being justified in accepting psychological explanations, which support counterfactuals. Within this spectrum, Horgan seems to occupy a middle position. He does not regard the causal-explanatory relevance of mental properties and psychological explanations to be grounded in physical mechanisms, even though he requires that some such physical mechanism exists. But Horgan insists that the “higher level generalizations must be non-coincidental, when viewed from a lower level perspective.”42 For that purpose, he has some sympathy for an account of mental content in terms of relational proper function. It allows us to regard mental content as a naturalistically “kosher” notion and generalizations in the mental idiom as not merely coincidental. As I will elaborate in the following, the above positions can each be understood only as a partial response to Kim’s concerns. The fundamental problem of the debate about mental causation consists in the fact that all sides take very different examples to be paradigmatic for the relation between psychological and neurobiological explanations. They all thus nourish themselves from a one-sided diet. Baker’s focus on particular autonomous cases of folk-psychological explanations does not allow her to take the question of the constitution of causal powers by lower level properties seriously enough, even though, as has been just shown, that question is prima facie plausible in some cases of psychological explanations. On the other hand, Marras, Antony and Levine’s claims that an explanation of the causal powers of mental properties in terms of lower level properties does not threaten the causal explanatory autonomy of psychological explanations is valid only for a limited range of cases, since the scope of the causal inheritance principle is more limited than they and Kim suggest. As I will show, it phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.16 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 17 can be plausibly applied only in situations in which the causal powers of higher order properties can be explained through the implementing mechanism or the interaction of such mechanisms in a certain environment. Yet, Marras, Antony, and Levine are right that this, contrary to Kim’s interpretation of the causal inheritance principle, does not automatically imply that the science of the implementing mechanism describes all of its specific causal powers. In none of these cases do we however necessarily need, as Horgan has suggested, a further explication of the higher order property in terms of the lower order property. I will illustrate these claims with two examples. Take Van Gulick’s example43 of the color changing mechanism of a chameleon, which he uses to argue that wide content can be understood as having causal powers that are not identical with or supervene on the causal powers of internal physical states. Chemistry and physiology might be able to explain the causal mechanism responsible for the color changing mechanism of a chameleon, but that such a color changing mechanism has the causal power of helping the chameleon to avoid detection by predators is not recognized on the chemical and physiological level. It is a mistake to think that the science, which explicates the color changing mechanism, also explains the survival of chameleons in certain environments. The causal power of being able to escape detection by predators is not merely constituted by the color changing mechanism but by having this specific color changing mechanism in a certain environment with predators of specific sensory capacities. In a different environment the color changing mechanism would not have such a causal power. One could therefore argue that biology describes different causal powers than physiology, even though the causal power to avoid detection requires a physical implementing mechanism. Similarly, psychological explanations such as “He went to the kitchen because he wanted to drink a beer” or “He opened the box because he wanted to make tea” are not in competition with neurobiological explanations because psychological explanations refer to the causal powers an organism has within a specific environment. As the discussion of about the externalistic constitution of mental content has revealed, psychological explanations take as their primary subject of explanation the person in so far phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.17 18 KARSTEN R. STUEBER as that person is interacting with a certain environment and whose behavior is directed towards that environment. Neurobiological mechanisms are necessary preconditions for the possession of these causal powers that persons have in certain environments and that are described in the mental idiom. Yet neurobiology is not able to reconstruct these causal powers solely within its domain, which abstracts from the embeddedness of the organism in a certain environment. Nevertheless, the above example is a case in which we should find it plausible to apply the causal inheritance principle or a plausible extension of it. Even though it is correct to maintain that explaining the color changing mechanism does not explain the capacity to escape detection in certain environments, that capacity can be easily explained by or derived from knowledge of the color changing mechanism, knowledge of common sense physical facts of the environment and knowledge of the sensory mechanisms of potential predators. These are strictly speaking the implementing mechanisms of the capacity to escape detection in a certain environment. Similarly, knowledge of the neurobiological mechanisms, the movements of the body and knowledge of the environment should allow us to account for the movement towards the kitchen or the opening of the box. I would thus suggest the following modification of the causal inheritance principle in order to analyze better how we should understand that the causal powers of higher order mental properties “piggyback” on the causal power of lower order properties. (CIP*) The causal powers of an instance of a psychological/mental property M are identical with all or a subset of the causal powers of the instance of the physical properties {P1 . . . Pn } that constitute its realizing or implementing mechanism, only if all the relevant effects of M can be fully explained in terms of the causal implementing mechanisms and other facts of the environment as described in “physical” terminology by commonsense or scientific theories. In order to understand CIP* correctly, it is important to note that I understand “physical terminology” rather broadly as referring to commonsense terms like “houses” and “cars” and to more technical terms like “cells,” “neurons,” and “quarks.” It only excludes terminology that essentially and irreducibly presupposes the existence of mentality. In that case we certainly could not speak of the causal powers of higher order mental properties as merely piggybacking phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.18 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 19 on lower order physical mechanisms. Notice also that the notion of explainability implicit in my formulation of CIP* is squarely situated in the epistemic context of our scientific practices and does not appeal to the practice of a god like intellect not accessible to us. It is only our scientific practices that provide us with the necessary conceptual and theoretic resources that allow us to identify the relevant underlying causal mechanisms. Even if our scientific practices might at the same time reflect our cognitive limitations it is only from the perspective of these practices that the issue of explanatory exclusion arises and not from the viewpoint of the cosmic exile. According to CIP* it is indeed the case that the causal powers of the chameleon’s survival is in a broad sense piggybacking on lower order causal mechanisms.44 Yet one has to stress against Kim that strictly speaking, it is still true that the science that explains the color changing mechanism, does not alone explain the causal power of escaping detection in a certain environment. One has to appeal to knowledge outside of its specific domain in order to do that. For pragmatic reasons it thus might make sense to establish a “discipline” with its own terminology that focuses only on the interaction of certain physical mechanisms in specific environments and that describes the causal powers such systems have within this environment. Whether or not this implies that the relationship between psychological explanations and neurobiological explanations of behavior should be seen at times in analogy to the relationship between the basic sciences and the so called applied sciences – like between physics/chemistry and the engineering sciences that deal with the causal properties of cars, airplanes and batteries – instead of being conceived of as being similar to the relation between physics and biology, I will leave undecided. It is, however, important to stress that nothing so far forces me to accept that psychological explanations appeal to causal powers that emerge somehow magically from the physical realm. They describe real causal powers that physical entities have in a certain environment, but that are not necessarily described by neurobiology because its explanatory interest is not mainly focused on the interaction between that physical entity and the environment. phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.19 20 KARSTEN R. STUEBER The above example represents only a partial range of psychological explanations. Take the following examples: “I signed the mortgage papers because I wanted to buy a house” or “President Clinton signed legislation proposed by Congress into law because he wanted to end welfare as we know it.”45 Examples like these ones are different from the cases discussed so far and cannot be seen in analogy to the chameleon case, because they involve an essential mental and intentional dimension. And as I will show, it is exactly for this reason that CIP* does not apply in these cases. No knowledge of a broad range of external and non-intentional factors of the environment together with knowledge of the neural states of the brain that caused the movement of the hand signing the contract or the law will enable me to explain why that movement of the hand has the causal power of entering into a certain contract with the bank or of creating a new law of the country. Proponents of the principle of autonomy like Stich and Kim, however, might deny the last claim. The principle of autonomy states that “explanatory psychological properties and relations are supervenient upon the current internal physical properties of organisms.”46 According to the intuitions supporting this principle, psychological explanations have to be able to explain my behavior and the behavior of my exact physical replica, since we both should behave in an identical manner as long as we describe our behavior autonomously or narrowly. President Clinton’s and my physical replica would thus “sign” the exact same papers. Proponents of the principle of autonomy readily admit that in a certain sense President Clinton and his physical replica do not show the same behavior if we individuate it widely. Only President Clinton’s signature has the power to change proposed legislation into the laws of the country, in the same way that only I (and not my physical replica) can sell the car I own. President Clinton’s replica is not President of the United States, since he was not elected, and my replica is not the owner of my car since he did not buy it. Nevertheless this does not necessarily show that there is a psychological difference between me and my replica. All that is required for understanding the difference in wide behavior is to recognize that our behavior is embedded in an environment with different historical, social and legal facts. As Stich suggests in order to explain why I sell my car, we first phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.20 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 21 need an explanation of the behavior I exhibited while selling my car, autonomously described. Second, we need an account of why that behavior, in those circumstances, constituted the act of selling my car. The second component of the story will marshal historical facts, legal facts and perhaps other sorts of facts as well.47 If these intuitions in favor of the principle of autonomy hold up, then psychological explanations would seem to be preempted by neurobiological explanations. The causal powers of psychological properties would piggyback on the underlying physical mechanisms, at least in the sense articulated by CIP*. Nevertheless, proponents of the principle of the autonomy are mistaken in thinking that explanations of behavior can be neatly separated in an internal component that is supervenient on the internal physical states of an organism and external facts of the environment that would allow CIP* to be applied. As particularly Baker has pointed out, talking about social and legal institutions for example has “intentional presuppositions.”48 Moreover the behavior that we want to explain like selling a car or signing mortgage papers is constituted partly in reference to intentional attitudes that are widely individuated and that we assume to be causally involved in the production of the behavior.49 It is, for example, part of our very conception of morally responsible and legally binding behavior that the agent knows what he is doing. If a bank employee tricks me into signing mortgage papers while I was thinking that I was signing a deposit slip, then I did not sign mortgage papers in any legally binding manner. This is however not merely a difference between external factors in the environment. How I conceive of my action makes a difference of how we have to characterize my action. These actions require that I have a certain conceptual repertoire that contains a minimal understanding of the notion of a contract and the notion of a mortgage, ownership, law, and other relevant notions. For that very reason we also do not think of children as being capable of signing contracts, since they lack the required mental maturity and conceptual sophistication. The attribution of such concepts and beliefs involves attributing content that is widely individuated. In order to have such intentional attitudes it is necessary that I have a history of living in a certain social and natural environment. In this context it also does not seem to be of much help to try to phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.21 22 KARSTEN R. STUEBER come up with a narrow equivalent of concepts like mortgage and contract, since for my action to be individuated in a certain manner it is required that I have an adequate understanding of the environment I am acting in and not merely a narrow equivalent of that understanding. Here, we have a clear case of irreducible cross-classification and robust counterfactual relations, which cannot in principle be explained in light of further knowledge of the wider environment without essential reference to mentality. For that very reason we can also not speak of causal powers of psychological states as merely piggybacking on underlying physical mechanisms. I would also suggest that the cross-classification between social and intentional properties on the one hand and physical properties on the other has to do with the fact that intentional and social categories both delineate properties that have an essential historical aspect, if viewed from the perspective of their supervenience base. As has been often pointed out, in order to attribute a specific intentional state, which is individuated widely, we have to assume a certain history of causal interaction between an individual and the substances in his environment. Similar observations apply to social categories that clearly define causal powers of certain individuals like “President of the United States” or “German Kaiser.” An individual can be a US President only if he went through a certain causal history of being elected. In order to be President of the US that election also has to be part of the wider historical context, in which the US established itself as an independent nation.50 It is thus hardly surprising that the causal power of an individual in the social realm cannot be described on the physical level.51 (Only philosophers do indeed legitimately wonder about such causal powers.) Within the realm of the physical sciences – at least an ideal physics and chemistry – we assume that the physical states of the world at t1 on can be explained in light of our knowledge of the fundamental law of nature and our knowledge of the states of the world at time t0 (t1 > t0 ).52 Even if a certain physical history is nomologically necessary in order for a world to be in a certain physical state at t0 , this does not seem to be conceptually necessary for explaining the physical states of that world at t1 . Indeed for the purpose of these explanations it does not seem to matter that much phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.22 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 23 whether or not the physical world has a particular causal history. Assume for a moment that there is a world that was created five minutes ago and was at that time physically indistinguishable from our world. What we surely know is that this world cannot be physically distinguished from our world right now, yet it will not have a President of the US and its inhabitants will lack certain intentional states. Certain psychological and social explanations do not apply and are only true of the world with a certain causal history. However, insofar as the time between t0 and t1 is concerned, the same physical explanation applies to both worlds. Does this position violate the general framework of physicalism by denying that higher order properties supervene on lower order physical properties? This is for Kim the minimal condition any physicalist must accept. Moreover does the position argue for a worrisome version of dualism, in which the causal power of higher order properties somehow appears magically, since it cannot be explained through lower order properties? Kim might also ask whether it is indeed conceivable that an exact physical duplicate of our world lacks any other causal power that we describe with our social and intentional concepts.53 Let me briefly address these worries. I deny that psychological properties supervene on the brain states of persons. This however does not deny that social and intentional properties supervene globally on physical properties, at least if one includes the physical history of the world as part of the supervenience base. It also does not exclude the possibility that mental properties and social properties might supervene on more specific but “larger spatio-temporal” regions, which Horgan characterizes as “regional supervenience.”54 Yet, given the above argument and the different explanatory structure of physical explanations and psychological explanations, we should not expect that such supervenience could be explained in terms of lower level properties and categories that individuate causal mechanisms on the lower level. Rather from the perspective of the lower level sciences the supervenience base for social and intentional properties would have to be regarded as gerrymandered. Even if psychological explanations require certain physical mechanisms, this does thus not preempt psychological and social properties from phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.23 24 KARSTEN R. STUEBER having their own causal power, since they do not fall within the scope of the causal inheritance principle. If this is a version of dualism, it is neither mysterious nor worrisome from the physicalist perspective. The causal efficacy and explanatory relevance of mental and social properties has to do with the way the world is and the way we divide up explanatory tasks between the various disciplines. Kim’s frequent suggestion that a world, which is an exact physical duplicate of our world, has to have the exact same causal powers is a rather ambiguous manner of probing one’s physicalist intuitions. If it means that a world, which God created ex nihilo five minutes ago, has the exact same powers, I would suggest that a physicalist does not have to agree with that intuition. There is indeed a physical difference between it and our world. It lacks our physical history and origin, even if that does not make a difference to explanations on the physical level. It is not clear how seriously a physicalist has to take such thought experiments, since it is nomologically not very likely that an exact physical duplicate of our world could exist without having our physical history. The physicalist is only committed to the claim that worlds that are physically identical and have the exact same physical history are identical in their causal powers. Moreover, physicalism is compatible with the claim that having a certain physical history makes a difference to the causal properties of events. But given the manner in which we divide up the disciplines and given the way the world is – i.e. a world in which difference in physical history makes a difference in causal powers, it is not surprising, even for a physicalist, that physics does not describe and explain all causal powers. Accordingly, the denial that the causal inheritance principle can be plausibly applied in all contexts does not imply that higher order properties have magical powers. My position only entails that certain physical entities – in certain physical environments with a certain physical history – have causal powers that are not described by the physical-biological sciences, given the explanatory interests and conceptual resources of these sciences. From that conclusion however it does not follow that we have to assume that the world is partly a non-physical world, one rather has to conclude that physics does not describe all the causal powers of the physical objects in phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.24 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 25 the world. It also does not imply that the recognition of the interest relativity of explanations commits us to a purely epistemic and non-realistic conception of explanation. Rather the special sciences describe objective causal powers and causal relations that we are able to recognize only within the context of the conceptual resources of the particular science. The above strategy to counter the explanatory exclusion argument, consists in denying that psychological and neurobiological explanations in general explain the same phenomena, i.e. my response to Kim is part of the dual explanandum strategy. So far I have not addressed the cases in which we seem to explain mere bodily movement like the raising of a hand in a psychological manner. And these cases of direct mental to physical causation are the cases that Kim focuses on, since they are in direct violation of the physical closure principle. In light of the above considerations, one should first recognize that these examples of psychological explanations are limited. The range of normal psychological explanations has to be seen as a continuum that spans the examples, in which we seem to explain mere bodily movements, to instances, in which it is still rational to apply the causal inheritance principle, and cases, in which that principle does not seem to apply. Yet there are in principle two ways to address even the cases that Kim primarily focuses on. First, one could insist that psychological explanations are not intended to causally explain bodily movements as such, not even in these cases. They try to explain the bodily movements insofar as they are directed towards a certain environment. One could maintain that we do not psychologically explain the hand raising as such but we explain the hand raising insofar as it is an attempt to be noticed within the classroom or as far as it is the attempt to participate in a conversation. I am not sure I am allowed such reasoning, given the manner in which I explained the limitation of the causal inheritance principle. But even if one agrees with Kim that in these cases neurobiological explanations do exclude psychological explanations, this does not imply that neurobiological explanations in general exclude psychological explanations. There still remains a proper domain for psychology and folk psychology. That psychological and neurobiological explanations overlap in these cases just seems to be an phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.25 26 KARSTEN R. STUEBER indication of certain realignments of explanatory domains between neurobiology and psychology. It shows how much our knowledge of neurobiology has advanced. Such marginal realignment of explanatory domains has to be expected in the course of the advancement of scientific knowledge. This however does not justify the conclusion that neurobiology and the rest of the physical sciences will take over the whole domain of psychology. At the end of the article I would like to address briefly a worry that might arise from considerations of practicing neuroscientists. So far we have rejected the causal explanatory exclusion argument because we insisted that psychological and neurobiological explanations explain different phenomena. We seem to have assumed that neurobiological explanations are primarily suited for explaining behavior narrowly described but not actions of social agents. In arguing in that manner we followed the dialectic of Kim’s explanatory exclusion argument and his implicit commitment to the principle of psychological autonomy. Yet neuroscientists do not seem to explain behavior only in the narrow sense. Neuroscientists study social emotions, they study socio-pathologies, mental illnesses such as depression, the neural mechanisms of social interaction and recognition, and so on. Nothing I have said is meant to exclude this neuroscientific research. Indeed we do want a better understanding of the underlying causal mechanisms of such complex and widely individuated behavior. We probably should also expect some further realignment between neuroscience conceived in this manner and psychology using the intentional idiom. This seems to be especially true for our understanding of the causes of certain mental deficiency like autism, which in the end could be due to an abnormality of the underlying neurobiological mechanism. Yet if my considerations so far are correct then such neuroscientific research should not be expected to completely replace explanations in our normal psychological idiom. If I am right in claiming that we cannot reduce our ordinary notions of meaning and content to neurobiological and physical states and we need to appeal to these notions in order to explain certain social behavior, then neurobiology even widely construed will not be able to explain why a certain behavior has certain causal powers in certain environments with the specificity required for serving our explanatory interests. Instead of having to phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.26 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 27 worry about explanatory exclusion in this context, we can welcome the additional knowledge that neurobiology will provide and that will enrich our ordinary psychological knowledge of the world. 4. CONCLUSION As I have argued, it is a fundamental mistake of the contemporary debate about mental causation to be focusing only on a few examples, which are particularly instructive for one’s own reductionist or anti-reductionist position. Focusing merely on cases of a psychological explanation of bodily movements indeed does not allow us to recognize that for a core part of folk-psychological explanations the dual explanandum perspective is still a viable option. Such psychological explanations are interested in explaining human agency in a wider social and natural context. As we have also seen, for such explanations the causal inheritance CIP or its extension CIP* does not apply because the social and intentional categories that are used to define this domain are intractably linked and have a wide historical supervenience base. Another mistake of the debate in mental causation consists in trying to argue either that none of our mental explanations can be regarded as describing objective causal powers in the world or that all of them do so. Indeed given that common sense and scientific theory constitute an epistemic continuum and given what we know about the advancement of science so far, such all or none positions are not very plausible. Nevertheless , if I am right, it is also not very plausible that explanations in the mental idiom can on the whole be eliminated, reduced to or be regarded as merely piggybacking on the necessary physical implementing mechanisms.55 Rather then taking this fact as problematic, I suggest that the success and permanence of explanatory practices, which is compatible with lower level sciences, since they explain different phenomena, should be taken as evidence for the correctness of a realist interpretation of such practices.56 phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.27 28 KARSTEN R. STUEBER NOTES 1 For that very reason, some philosophers have recently argued that one should reassess the recent orthodoxy that psychological explanations are causal explanations. See for example S. Sehon, 2000. I on the other hand am still persuaded by Davidson’s arguments in “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” 2 Baker, 1993, p. 91. 3 In the literature one can find numerous versions of the dual explanandum strategy. As I will show in the third section it is in my opinion fruitful to conceive of the counterfactual approach to mental causation in this manner. For short summary of the literature in this context see note 34. Dretske is another prominent proponent of the dual explanandum strategy. For him, mental events are not efficient causes but structuring causes. See Dretske 1988 and “Mental Events as Structuring Causes of Behavior” in Heil/Mele, 1993. For a discussion of Dretske see also Kim “Dretske on How Reasons Explain Behavior” in his 1993. Dretske’s conception of mental causation depends on a reductive and teleosemantic account of mental content. I am however skeptical that such an account can succeed. See my 1997b. I will attempt to show that the dual explanandum strategy is plausible even without requiring a reductive account of content. Also note that I am using the term “neurobiology” very liberally. The term refers to all sciences that could provide explanations of behavior using only the physical, i.e. non-mentalistic, idiom. 4 Kim, 1996, p. 206. Kim himself shows more sympathy for the dualexplanandum approach in the context of trying to provide an account of the “nature of rationalizing explanations” insofar as they are not “causal-predictive.” See Kim, 1984. 5 For this argument see especially Kim, “The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism”, p. 279ff and “Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion”, esp. p. 254ff. Both articles can be found in Kim, 1993. If it is not indicated otherwise, all of the citations of Kim’s work refer to this book. 6 See Kim, “Mechanism, Purpose and Explanatory Exclusion”, p. 256 and Kim, 1988. 7 Kim, “The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism”, p. 279. 8 Kim, p. 280. 9 Kim “The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism”, p. 281. See also Kim, 1998, pp. 44/45. 10 See Kim, “Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion”, pp. 257/258. 11 A word of caution: My purpose here is not a Davidson exegesis. I think however that these considerations constitute the best response to the explanatory exclusion argument that Davidson has. I also agree with Crane that the problem of mental causation as articulated by the causal/explanatory exclusion argument is not Davidson’s problem. See Crane, 1995, p. 226ff. Yet Crane fails to consider the epistemic version of Kim’s argument. Some of Davidson’s own remarks come close to the epistemic response as I have described it. See, for example, his 1993, p. 16. Yet Davidson himself muddies the water by trying to account for the rele- phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.28 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 29 vance of mental “properties”/predicates through a weak supervenience relation between physical and mental “properties.” Furthermore, in Davidson’s writing even the epistemic autonomy of psychological explanations seems sometimes in doubt. In “Mental Events” he says that psychological generalizations provide merely evidence for strict laws in the physical idiom. If one conceives of the relation in this manner, it seems that the mental does not possess any explanatory autonomy. See Horgan, 1989, p. 53. Again in Davidson (1995, p. 276), he suggests that we can formulate strict laws only in the context of an explanatory practice that is not constrained by any practical interest in control but is guided by the theoretical interest in truth. But if this were the case, then Davidson would have to admit that psychological explanations are merely pragmatically interesting, whereas only physical explanations are objectively true. Besides the explanatory exclusion problem, Davidson’s position of anomalous monism faces other problems in accounting for the causal character of rationalizing explanations. See L. Antony, 1989. 12 See also Kim, 1993b, pp. 21/22. 13 See Thagard, 1999. 14 See Kim, “Postscript”, p. 361. 15 There however still remains the question whether an identity solution saves the causal efficacy of the mental or whether it merely “buys the reality of the mental at the cost of its autonomy” (Antony/Levine, 1997, p. 84). 16 Kim, 1998, pp. 94/95. See also Kim, “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction”, p. 328 and “Postscript”, p. 362ff. J. Heil also favors this solution in his 1992. For a more detailed account of what functionalization involves see Kim, 1999, pp. 10–11. It is important to note that Kim somehow modifies and clarifies his physicalism in his 1998 in order to avoid a generalization of the explanatory exclusion argument to all properties specified by the special sciences. Since my primary focus is the problem of mental causation, we can abstract from this complication of Kim’s position at the moment. I will briefly elaborate on it in the next section of this article. 17 Kim, 1993a, p. 99. 18 Kim, 1998, p. 101. 19 See for example Putnam, 1988. 20 Fodor/LePore, 1992, p. 15ff. This is all very contested philosophical territory. Kim acknowledges as much in his 1996, chap. 8, but seems to be persuaded by the supervenience intuition that a functionalization has to be possible in principle. As his article “psycho-physical supervenience” (in Kim, 1993) reveals, he also seems to have strong sympathies for some notion of narrow content. For a critique of Fodor see Block 1993. As an introduction into this subject matter consult Block’s entry “Holism, Mental and Semantic” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I tend to agree with Fodor and LePore that holism has disastrous consequences within the context of a conceptual role semantics. I, however, argue that one has to distinguish between an empiricist version of holism, which derives from Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and the holism of radical interpretation. Only the second form of holism is implied by our folk notions of phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.29 30 KARSTEN R. STUEBER meaning and content. It furthermore does not have the aforementioned disastrous consequences. For these distinctions see my 1997a. For a critique of the idea that our ordinary notions of meaning and content imply holism and an interesting development of a molecularist position see also Devitt, 1996. 21 For a critical discussion of Dretske and Millikan’s teleo-semantic theories see my 1997b. For a critical discussion of Dretske’s position see also the articles in Br. McLaughlin (ed.) (1991), especially the articles by Kim and Horgan. Interestingly, Kim recognizes holism as a problem for the causal-correlational approach to content. See his 1996, p. 193. 22 See Baker, 1995, p. 119; Burge, 1993, p. 117. 23 Burge, 1986, p. 18. 24 Baker, 1993, p. 92. 25 Burge, 1993, pp. 102 and 116. For a critique of Burge see also Grundmann, 1999. Terry Horgan argues for a similar as Burge position in his 1993. 26 Burge, 1993, p. 116. 27 See Block, 1990, p. 168 and Block, forthcoming. 28 Kim, 1998, p. 85. For some implications regarding the issue of downward causation see Kim (1999). In my explication of Kim’s position I have also profited from Ned Block’s “Do Causal Powers Drain Away” (forthcoming) and from the anonymous referee’s comments. 29 Kim, 1998, pp. 86/87. 30 For some objections to Kim see Block (forthcoming). 31 See Kim, 1998, pp. 60–67. 32 T. Horgan, 1997, p. 179. See also his more extensive description of his compatibilist position in Horgan, 1993. 33 See Baker, 1995, p. 128ff. 34 As far as I know, only Marras sees his counterfactual approach to mental causation directly as part of the dual explanandum strategy. See his 1998. I will explain in the following where I differ from Marras. Even though Baker does not label her approach in this manner, it seems to me that she is effectively arguing for it in suggesting that physical explanations do not provide “deeper” explanations of the same phenomenon as intentional explanations. See her 1995, especially p. 135 and 1999, p. 8. Horgan comes close to it by suggesting that different counterfactual patterns concern a phenomenon and its cause insofar as they instantiate different pairs of properties. Burge (1986) and (1989), esp. section V, seems to be sometimes closer to the outlined position as in his (1993). As his later article indicates, he, however, does not seem to recognize that the emphasis on explanatory practices is best understood as being part of the dual explanandum strategy. 35 Cf. Millikan, 1993, chap. 7 & 8. 36 At this stage of the article I am not worrying about whether or not this characterization of neurobiology adequately describes the actual practice of neuroscience. One might wonder about this assertion since practicing neuroscientists do not seem to be concerned merely with explaining narrowly described behavior but are also interested in accounting for emotions, social reasoning and phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.30 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 31 behavior such as homosexuality on a neuroscientific level. See for example the issues addressed in Schulkin, 2000. Rather, I am following Kim in my argumentative strategy. In the context of his discussion of the causal explanatory exclusion argument, Kim himself seems to conceive of neuroscience primarily in a narrow fashion, because he conceives of psychological explanations also as primarily concerned with explaining behavior narrowly described. If this is the case then explanatory exclusion seems to be indeed a real danger. See his “Psychophysical Supervenience” in his (1993) and his 1996, p. 206. I will address some of the questions regarding broad neuroscientific explanations at the end of this section. 37 Kim, “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction”, p. 326. See also Kim, 1998, p. 54. Note, however, that for Kim the causal inheritance principle does not apply to micro-based properties. If I understand Kim correctly, the difference between micro-based higher-level properties and mental higher order properties consists in the fact that causal powers of micro-based properties do not magically emerge. We indeed have a full account of these properties in terms of their micro-structure. 38 Baker, 1999, p. 13ff; Baker, 1995, chap. 8, especially p. 227. 39 Baker, 1999, p. 15. 40 Marras, 2000, p. 158. 41 Antony/Levine, 1997, p. 102. 42 Horgan, 1993, p. 303. 43 See R. van Gulick, 1989, p. 156. 44 CIP* also applies to cases of externalist explanations that Peacocke emphasizes. See his 1993. 45 Insofar as the examples are here concerned, I do not claim any originality. Signing contracts etc. is an example often used by philosophers. 46 Kim, “Psychophysical Supervenience”, in his 1993, p. 177. For the following see particularly Stich, 1983, pp. 164–170. 47 Stich, 1983, p. 196. 48 Baker, 1995, p. 74. See also pp. 4 and 75ff. 49 See also Devitt, 1996, pp. 294 and 296 for making a similar point. Devitt’s examples however seem to allow for an application of CIP*. For a vigorous defense of wide psychological states as being causally explanatory see particularly Burge, 1986 and 1989. 50 The primary reason why the causal inheritance principle applied to my first example was precisely because the explanandum of “being able to avoid detection from predators” can be characterized without essential reference to intentional and mental categories. It is however worthwhile noticing that this category also does not seem to have an extensively wide historical supervenience base. 51 This distinction seems to be at least true insofar as the categories of physics and chemistry are concerned. Certain functional categories in biology seem to have a similar irreducible character. Pace Millikan, this however does not mean that intentional categories can be reduced to each other. Even though central biological and social categories are both irreducible, they do not necessarily concern the same causal history. phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.31 32 KARSTEN R. STUEBER 52 In this context we can, in my opinion, ignore the distinction between probabilistic and deterministic laws. 53 See Kim, 1998, pp. 69 and 101. 54 Horgan, 1993, pp. 569/570. Note here however, I leave the question of regional supervenience undecided. In order to make sense of regional supervenience we would seem to require a functionalization of mental properties in a wide sense and it is not clear to me that this is possible. 55 Strictly speaking, my argument for the dual explanandum strategy applies only to psychological explanations in terms of intentional mental states. It seems that nothing I have said can be directly applied to phenomenal states, at least if one conceives of them as purely qualitative states that are devoid of intentionality. Again I do not regard this as a shortcoming of my argument, since I am not persuaded that one can from a philosophical perspective save all of our commonsense psychological explanations from the advancement of the physical sciences. Maybe one has to make one’s peace with epiphenomenalism insofar as phenomenal states are concerned, if one believes in the irreducibility of qualia. Or if one believes in a form of reduction, rejoice in the eliminability of psychological explanations in terms of phenomenal mental states. I myself do not think that matters are that bleak for qualitative mental states, especially if one does not focus only on such “purely” phenomenal states as pain but also takes into account more complex emotional states such as pride, guilt or even more basic emotions such as fear and sadness. Such states can be only conceived of insofar as they contain some intentionality. Even “purely” phenomenal states such as having pain seem to be somewhat integrated within the realm of intentionality. Indeed broadening one’s examples allows us again to recognize that pain does not only cause me to wince and cry but it also constitutes a reason for me to consult a doctor or go to the dentist. In this article, I do not commit myself to any of the above possible “solutions” in regard to phenomenal states. I hope, however, to have shown that the dual explanandum strategy constitutes a philosophically adequate response to the powerful explanatory exclusion argument. 56 Earlier and rather different versions of this article were read at the APA Central Division meeting, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the philosophy department of City College of the City University of New York and at a departmental colloquium at the College of the Holy Cross. I would like to thank the audience at these talks for their probing questions. I would also like to thank Thomas Grundmann, Bob Feleppa, David Henderson, Michael Lynch, Noah Latham, Al Mele (my commentar at the APA meeting), Manisha Sinha, Claudine Verheggen, and especially the anonymous referee for this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions. REFERENCES Antony, L (1989): ‘Anomalous Monism and the Problem of Explanatory Force’, Philosophical Review 48, 153–187. phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.32 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 33 Antony, L. (1999): ‘Making Room for the Mental’, Philosophical Studies 95, 37– 44. Antony, L. and Levine, J. (1997): “Reduction with Autonomy’, Philosophical Perspectives 11, 83–105. Baker, L.R. (1995): Explaining Attitudes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, L.R. (1993): ‘Metaphysics and Mental Causation’, in Heil/Mele (1993), pp. 75–95. Baker, L.R. (1999): ‘What is the Thing Called “Common Sense Psychology”?’, Philosophical Explorations 1, 3–19. Block, N. (1993): ‘Holism, Hyper-analyticity, and Hyper-Compositionality’, Mind and Language 8, 1–26. Block, N. (1990): ‘Can the Mind Change the World’, in G. Boolos (ed.), Meaning and Method (pp. 137–170), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Block, N. (forthcoming): ‘Do Causal Powers Drain Away?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Burge, T. (1986): ‘Individualism and Psychology’, The Philosophical Review 95, 3–45. Burge, T. (1989): ‘Individuation and Causation in Psychology’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70, 303–322. Burge, T. (1993): ‘Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice’, in Heil/Mele (1993), pp. 97–120. Corbi, J. and Prades, J. (2000): Minds, Causes and Mechanisms, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Crane, T. (1995): ‘The Mental Causation Debate’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69(suppl.), 211–236. Davidson, D. (1980): Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davidson, D. (1995): ‘Laws and Cause’, Dialectica 49, 263–279. Devitt, M. (1996): Coming to Our Senses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dretske, F. (1988): Explaining Behavior, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grundmann, Th. (1999): ‘Burge’s Antirealistic Argument Against Epiphenomenalism’, in J. Nidda-Rümelin (ed.), Analyomen 3 (pp. 521–528), Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Heil, J. (1992): The Nature of True Minds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heil, J. and Mele, A. (eds.) (1993): Mental Causation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horgan, T. (1989): ‘Mental Quasation’, Philosophical Perspectives 3, 47–76. Horgan, T. (1993a): ‘Nonreductive Materialism and the Explanatory Autonomy of Psychology’, in St. Wagner and R. Warner (eds.), Naturalism (pp. 295–320), Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Horgan, T. (1993b): ‘From Supervenience to Superdupervenience’, Mind 102, 555–586. phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.33 34 KARSTEN R. STUEBER Horgan, T. (1997): ‘Kim on Mental Causation and Causal Exclusion’, Philosophical Perspectives 11, 165–184. Kim, J. (1984): ‘Self-Understanding and Rationalizing Explanations’, Philosophia Naturalis 82, 309–320. Kim, J. (1988): ‘Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy XII, 225–239. Kim, J. (1993): Supervenience and the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, J. (1996): Philosophy of Mind, Boulder: Westview Press. Kim, J. (1998): Mind in a Physical World, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kim, J. (1999): ‘Making Sense of Emergence’, Philosophical Studies 95, 3–36. LePore, E. and Loewer, B. (1987): ‘Mind Matters’, Journal of Philosophy 84, 630–642. LePore, E. and Loewer, B. (1989): ‘More on Making Mind Matter’, Philosophical Topics 17, 175–191. Marras, A. (2000): ‘Nonreductive Materialism and Mental Causation’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24, 465–494. Marras, A. (1998): ‘Kim’s Principle of Explanatory Exclusion’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76, 439–451. Marras, A. (2000): ‘Critical Notice’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30, 137– 160. Malcolm, N. (1968): ‘The Conceivability of Mechanism’, in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will (pp. 127–149), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. McLaughlin, Br. (1991), Dretske and His Critics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Millikan, R.G. (1993): White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peacocke, Chr. (1993): ‘Externalist Explanations’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93, 203–230. Pereboom, D. and Kornblith, H. (1991): ‘The Metaphysics of Irreducibility’, Philosophical Studies 63, 125–145. Putnam, H. (1988): Representation and Reality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Poland, J. (1994): Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sehon, S. (2000): ‘An Argument Against the Causal Theory of Action Explanation’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60, 67–85. Stueber, K. (1997a): ‘Holism and Radical Interpretation’, in G. Meggle (ed.) Analyomen 2 (pp. 290–298), Berlin/New York: DeGruyter. Stueber, K. (1997b): ‘Psychologische Erklärungen im Spannungsfeld des Interpretationismus und Reduktionismus’, Philosophische Rundschau 44, 304–328. Thagard, P. (1999): How Scientists Explain Disease, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Van Gulick, R. (1989): ‘Metaphysical Arguments for Internalism and Why They Don’t Work’, in St. Silvers (ed.), Rerepresentations (pp. 151–159), Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.34 MENTAL CAUSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF EXPLANATION 35 Van Gulick, R. (1993): ‘Who is in Charge Here? And Who is Doing All the Work?’. in Heil/Mele (1993), pp. 232–256. Yablo, St. (1992): ‘Mental Causation’, The Philosophical Review 101, 245–280. Department of Philosophy College of the Holy Cross Worceste, MA 01610-2395 USA phil8321.tex; 8/09/2003; 18:50; p.35

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

Mental Causation and the Paradoxes of Explanation

Mental Causation and the Paradoxes of Explanation

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS