Abstract
Mental and physical causes do not competedthe presence of
one does not exclude the efficacy of the other. This point is obvious
from the perspective of an interventionist theory of causation, but
only when this theory gets its proper due. Doubts about the
interventionist justification for concluding that there is both
physical and mental causation, we have argued, rest on misunderstandings
of interventionism. When looking to interventions
to reveal causal structures, care must be taken to consider the right
variable sets. Jaegwon Kim’s diagram is the wrong starting point for
interventionist causal reasoning because it includes variables that
are related by non-causal relations in addition to causal relations.
When it comes to understanding exclusion, less is more.