The Problem of Causal/Explanatory Exclusion

The problem of mental causation, at least in one of its most basic forms, is how to reconcile two plausible but potentially incompatible intuitions. The first intuition is that the mind makes a difference in the world. For example, I am writing this paragraph for certain reasons, and before long I will stop to eat something because of certain desires for food. Seemingly, these reasons and desires play a role in what happens. The second intuition is that the physical world is causally complete, so everything that happens is the result of the movement of physical particles. For example, the neural turbulence in my head seems to be the actual cause of my hands fluttering across the keyboard in certain ways, whilst certain muscle contractions in my arms cause the food to enter my mouth. What room is there for the mind to play a causal role when everything seems to happen because of the movement of physical particles? For some time reductive physicalism was the prevailing solution to the problem of mental causation (Place, 1956; Feigl, 1958; Smart, 1959). Reductive physicalism posits a reductive identity of the mental to the physical. In so doing, it endorses physical causal completeness, but achieves mental causation as well, since the mental is identical with the causally efficacious physical. In the nineteen seventies, nonreductive physicalism replaced reductive physicalism as the predominant solution to the problem of mental causation in the nineteen seventies. Nonreductive physicalism solves the problem of mental causation by agreeing that the physical is causally complete, but achieves mental causation as well by supposing that the mental supervenes upon the physical, and thus inherits the causal power of the physical. In recent years this nonreductive consensus has been threatened. This is partially due to an argument that has been distilled from Jaegwon Kim’s principle of causal/explanatory exclusion. One part of this compound principle is the principle of causal exclusion, which states that there can be no more than a single sufficient cause for any given event (Kim, 2005, p. 42). This principle of causal exclusion creates the following problem: the nonreductive physicalist endorses the causal completeness of the physical, and so she agrees that there is a sufficient physical cause for any given event. The nonreductive physicalist also avoids making a reductive identity between the mental and the physical, so she agrees that the mental is distinct from the physical. Therefore, if a given event has a complete physical cause, and the mental cause is distinct from this complete physical cause, then this supervening mental cause must be excluded. The physical cause does all of the work, so there is no work left over for the mental cause. In this dissertation I consider and respond to Jaegwon Kim’s principle of causal/explanatory exclusion. I conclude that the most promising response to the problem generated from causal exclusion is to endorse what I call structuralism. Structuralism construes mental states as mereological structures, or configurations, of parts. Macro structure plays a role in determining which micro properties its parts will and will not instantiate, so there is a genuine role for the mental to play. The micro properties that are instantiated, however, do all of the causal work, so causal completeness is secured as well. This is a nonreductive position, since the mereological structure of the parts is not identical with the parts themselves. This model avoids the causal exclusion problem by noting that mereological relations are non-causal determinative relations, so mental states can play an important determinative role without contributing any causal power beyond what the causally sufficient micro properties of the parts contribute. This solution to the problem of causal exclusion affords a solution to the parallel problem generated from the principle of explanatory exclusion as well. The principle of explanatory exclusion states that “there can be no more than a single complete and independent explanation for any one event” (Kim, 1988, p. 233). I resolve this difficulty by adopting a nuanced form of what is called the dual-explananda reply. Since the above reasoning suggests that mental states are distinct from physical events, we can conclude that mental explanations and physiological explanations do not refer to the same thing, so there is no exclusion pressure between the two explanations

The Other Explanatory Gap

One of the driving questions in philosophy of mind is whether a person can be understood in purely physical terms. In this presentation, I wish to continue the project initiated by Donald Davidson, whose subtle position on this question has left many more perplexed than enlightened. The main reason for this perplexity is Davidson’s rather obscure pronouncements about the normativity of intentionality and its role in supporting psychophysical anomalism – the claim that there are no laws bridging our intentional states with states of our brain. Insofar as Davidson’s thesis is an ontological one – about the existence of laws or otherwise modally significant connections between the mental and the physical – I think his critics are correct: Davidson has not provided us with a successful argument for psychophysical anomalism. There is, however, a different argument, also based upon considerations about the normativity of intentionality that lead to an equally important conclusion. The conclusion is not ontological but rather epistemic: if thoughts do indeed display normativity, it is hard to understand how they would arise out of mere mechanical occurrences in the brain. To borrow a well-worn phrase, there is an “explanatory gap” between the mental and the physical. Originally coined to capture the epistemic darkness we confront in our attempt to understand phenomenal experiences in purely physical terms, the idea has yet to be explored in the area of contentful mental states or intentionality in general. My argument shall be this: considerations about the normativity of intentionality demonstrate that there is an explanatory gap between the intentional and the physical. In fact, if there were laws of the kind Davidson denies, then the world be more mysterious than if no such laws existed. The presence of an explanatory gap explains why this is so

Jerry Fodor on Non-conceptual Content

Proponents of non-conceptual content have recruited it for various philosophical jobs. Some epistemologists have suggested that it may play the role of “the given” that Sellars is supposed to have exorcised from philosophy. Some philosophers of mind (e.g., Dretske) have suggested that it plays an important role in the project of naturalizing semantics as a kind of halfway between merely information bearing and possessing conceptual content. Here I will focus on a recent proposal by Jerry Fodor. In a recent paper he characterizes non-conceptual content in a particular way and argues that it is plausible that it plays an explanatory role in accounting for certain auditory and visual phenomena. So he thinks that there is reason to believe that there is non-conceptual content. On the other hand, Fodor thinks that non-conceptual content has a limited role. It occurs only in the very early stages of perceptual processing prior to conscious awareness. My paper is examines Fodor’s characterization of non-conceptual content and his claims for its explanatory importance. I also discuss if Fodor has made a case for limiting non-conceptual content to non-conscious, sub-personal mental states

Beyond Income: What Else Predicts Very Low Food Security among Children?

We examine characteristics and correlates of households in the United States that are most likely to have children at risk of inadequate nutrition – those that report very low food security (VLFS) among their children. Using 11 years of the Current Population Survey, plus data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and American Time Use Survey, we describe these households in great detail with the goal of trying to understand how these households differ from households without such severe food insecurity. While household income certainly plays an important role in determining VLFS among children, we find that even after flexibly controlling for income-to-poverty rates some household characteristics and patterns of program participation have important additional explanatory power. Finally, our examination of the NHANES and ATUS data suggests an important role for both mental and physical health in determining the food security status of children

Extended minds and prime mental conditions: probing the parallels

Two very different forms of externalism about mental states appear prima facie unrelated: Williamson’s (1995, 2000) claim that knowledge is a mental state, and Clark & Chalmers’ (1998) extended mind hypothesis. I demonstrate, however, that the two approaches justify their radically externalist by appealing to the same argument from explanatory generality. I argue that if one accepts either Williamson’s claims or Clark & Chalmers’ claims on considerations of explanatory generality then, ceteris paribus, one should accept the other. This conclusion has implications for philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science

History and Intentions in the Experience of Artworks

The role of personal background knowledge--in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork--has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches' explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber, in press). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of "intention." I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist's abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception

How Many Kinds of Reasons?

Reasons can play a variety of roles in a variety of contexts. For instance, reasons can motivate and guide us in our actions (and omissions), in the sense that we often act in the light of reasons. And reasons can be grounds for beliefs, desires and emotions and can be used to evaluate, and sometimes to justify, all these. In addition, reasons are used in explanations: both in explanations of human actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., and in explanations of a wide range of phenomena involving all sorts of animate and inanimate substances.This diversity has encouraged the thought that the term ‘reason’ is ambiguous or has different senses in different contexts. Moreover, this view often goes hand in hand with the claim that reasons of these different kinds belong to different ontological categories:to facts (or something similar) in the case of normative/justifying reasons, and to mental states in the case of motivating/explanatory reasons.In this paper I shall explore some of the main roles that reasons play and, on that basis, I shall offer a classification of kinds of reasons. As will become clear, my classification of reasons is at odds with much of the literature in several respects: first, because of my views about how we should understand the claim that reasons are classified into different kinds; second, because of the kinds into which I think reasonsshould be classified; and, finally, because of the consequences I think this view has for the ontology of reasons

The realizers and vehicles of mental representation

The neural vehicles of mental representation play an explanatory role in cognitive psychology that their realizers do not. In this paper, I argue that the individuation of realizers as vehicles of representation restricts the sorts of explanations in which they can participate. I illustrate this with reference to Rupert’s (2011) claim that representational vehicles can play an explanatory role in psychology in virtue of their quantity or proportion. I propose that such quantity-based explanatory claims can apply only to realizers and not to vehicles, in virtue of the particular causal role that vehicles play in psychological explanations

A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation

Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to cognition. In this talk I sketch an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of mental content. I call the resulting package a deflationary account of mental representation and I argue that it avoids the problems that afflict competing accounts

Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons

This paper takes a closer look at ordinary thought and talk about motivating reasons, in an effort to better understand how it works. This is an important first step in understanding whether—and if so, how—such thought and talk should inform or constrain our substantive theorizing. One of the upshots is that ordinary judgments about motivating reasons are at best a partial and defeasible guide to what really matters, and that so-called factualists, propositionalists, and statists are all partly right, as well as partly wrong, when it comes to the question of what motivating reasons “are”