Dispositions and the metaphysics of mental causation

Kevin W Sharpe, Purdue University

Abstract

Mental causation poses a significant challenge to nonreductive physicalism. At the heart of this challenge is the problem of causal exclusion; if all physical events, including human actions, have sufficient physical causes and the mental is distinct from the physical, then barring widespread overdetermination, the physical causes of an action (and their properties) screen off the mental causes (and their properties) thereby rendering the latter causally inefficacious. Thus, we face a dilemma: either accept reductionism or embrace epiphenomenalism. Given the strength of our antecedent commitment to the causal efficacy of mental events and properties, physicalists are forced to accept reductionism. The problem of causal exclusion depends on a widely accepted causal principle: every effect has a single sufficient cause, unless it is overdetermined. My dissertation constitutes a sustained defense of nonreductive physicalism motivates a rejection of this causal principle. Chapter two presents and defends a formulation of functionalism, dispositionalism, according to which types of mental events are individuated by what they are disposed to cause rather than by their causal relations. Dispositionalism is a genuine alternative to its main competitor, relationalism, only if dispositions are intrinsic properties. Moreover, unless dispositions are distinct from their so-called causal bases, dispositionalism will collapse into a form of reductive physicalism. As both of these assumptions are controversial, I devote chapters three and four to their defense. In chapter five I defend a mereological account of realization according to which dispositions are parts of their bases by drawing on a novel account of property composition. Chapters six and seven consider the problem of causal exclusion in light of the work done in preceding chapters. Multiple sufficient causes are acceptable only if one can avoid widespread overdetermination. After a precise statement of the problem in chapter six, I argue, in chapter seven, that while most nonreductive physicalists are committed to an unacceptable form of overdetermination, the theory of mental properties I've defended is immune to the threat of overdetermination. Thus, my account is ideally suited to secure a genuine commitment to physicalism while preserving both the autonomy and causal efficacy of mental properties.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Bertolet, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy

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