Mental Causation and Exclusion: Why the Difference-making Account of Causation is No Help

Humana Mente 8 (29) (2015)
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Abstract

Peter Menzies has developed a novel version of the exclusion principle that he claims to be compatible with the possibility of mental causation. Menzies proposes to frame the exclusion principle in terms of a difference-making account of causation, understood in counterfactual terms. His new exclusion principle appears in two formulations: upwards exclusion — which is the familiar case in which a realizing event causally excludes the event that it realizes — and, more interestingly, downward exclusion, in which an event causally excludes its realizer. This paper shows that one consequence of Menzies’s proposed solution to the problem of mental causation is a ubiquitous violation of the principle of closure — a fact that forces him into a trilemma to which we see no satisfactory response.

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Author Profiles

Jose Luis Bermudez
Texas A&M University
Arnon Cahen
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

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Physicalism, or Something Near Enough.Jaegwon Kim - 2005 - Princeton University Press.
Mental causation.Stephen Yablo - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (2):245-280.
Physical Realization.Sydney Shoemaker - 2007 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Psychological predicates.Hilary Putnam - 1967 - In William H. Capitan & Daniel Davy Merrill (eds.), Art, mind, and religion. [Pittsburgh]: University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 37--48.

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