Mental causation: a defence

If we accept causal exclusion, property dualism and physical determinism, mental epiphenomenalism follows. Accord-ing 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 ex-amine Crane’s argument (2008) against the causal relevance of de-terminables, 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 dis-junctive properties may survive both Armstrong’s famous objections (1978)

The Metaphysics of Free Will: A Critique of Free Won’t as Double Prevention

The problem of free will is deeply linked with the causal relevance of mental events. The causal exclusion argument claims that, in order to be causally relevant, mental events must be identical to physical events. However, Gibb has recently criticized it, suggesting that mental events are causally relevant as double preventers. For Gibb, mental events enable physical effects to take place by preventing other mental events from preventing a behaviour to take place. The role of mental double preventers is hence similar to what Libet names free won’t, namely the ability to veto an action initiated unconsciously by the brain. In this paper I will propose an argument against Gibb’s account, the causal irrelevance argument, showing that Gibb’s proposal does not overcome the objection of systematic overdetermination of causal relevance, because mental double preventers systematically overdetermine physical double preventers, and therefore mental events are causally irrelevant

Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance

Constitutive mechanistic explanations are said to refer to mechanisms that constitute the phenomenon-to-be-explained. The most prominent approach of how to understand this constitution relation is Carl Craver’s mutual manipulability approach to constitutive relevance. Recently, the mutual manipulability approach has come under attack (Leuridan 2012; Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015; Romero 2015; Harinen 2014; Casini and Baumgartner 2016). Roughly, it is argued that this approach is inconsistent because it is spelled out in terms of interventionism (which is an approach to causation), whereas constitutive relevance is said to be a non-causal relation. In this paper, I will discuss a strategy of how to resolve this inconsistency, so-called fat-handedness approaches (Baumgartner and Gebharter 2015; Casini and Baumgartner 2016; Romero 2015). I will argue that these approaches are problematic. I will present a novel suggestion of how to consistently define constitutive relevance in terms of interventionism. My approach is based on a causal interpretation of mutual manipulability, where manipulability is interpreted as a causal relation between the mechanism’s components and temporal parts of the phenomenon

Can Program Explanations Save the Causal Efficacy of Beliefs?

Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit offered the "program\ud explanation account� (PEA) in order to vindicate the causal\ud relevance of mental states such as beliefs. According to\ud J&P, a property F of a cause-event c (potentially a mental\ud property) can be causally relevant for an effect-event e"s\ud having property G because "e had G because c had F� is\ud an informative, non-redundant program explanation. If\ud PEA succeeded, the causal relevance of beliefs would be\ud vindicated and mental property epiphenomenalism would\ud be avoided.1 However, it doesn"t succeed

Justification of Logarithmic Loss via the Benefit of Side Information

We consider a natural measure of relevance: the reduction in optimal prediction risk in the presence of side information. For any given loss function, this relevance measure captures the benefit of side information for performing inference on a random variable under this loss function. When such a measure satisfies a natural data processing property, and the random variable of interest has alphabet size greater than two, we show that it is uniquely characterized by the mutual information, and the corresponding loss function coincides with logarithmic loss. In doing so, our work provides a new characterization of mutual information, and justifies its use as a measure of relevance. When the alphabet is binary, we characterize the only admissible forms the measure of relevance can assume while obeying the specified data processing property. Our results naturally extend to measuring causal influence between stochastic processes, where we unify different causal-inference measures in the literature as instantiations of directed information

Causal Conditionals, Tendency Causal Claims and Statistical Relevance

Indicative conditionals and tendency causal claims are closely related to each other (e.g., Frosch and Byrne 2012), but despite these connections, they are usually studied separately. A unifiying framework could consist in their dependence on probabilistic factors such as statistical relevance, but theoretical research along these lines (e.g., Eells 1991; Douven 2008, 2016) needs to be strengthened by more empirical results. This paper closes that gap and presents empirical results on how judgments on tendency causal claims and indicative conditionals are driven by probabilistic factors, and how these factors (in particular statistical relevance) differ in their predictive power for both causal and conditional claims

Necessitarianism and Dispositions

In this paper, I argue in favor of necessitarianism, the view that dispositions, when stimulated, necessitate their manifestations. After introducing and clarifying what necessitarianism does and does not amount to, I provide reasons to support the view that dispositions once stimulated necessitate their manifestations according to the stimulating conditions and the relevant properties at stake. In this framework, I will propose a principle of causal relevance and some conditions for the possibility of interference that allow us to avoid the use of ceteris paribus clauses. I then defend necessitarianism from recent attacks raised by, among others, Mumford and Anjum, noting that the antecedent strengthening test is a test for causal relevance that raises no difficulties for necessitarianism