Nominalizations are expressions that are particularly challenging philosophically in that they help form singular terms that seem to refer to abstract or derived objects often considered controversial. The three standard views about the semantics of nominalizations are [1] that they map mere meanings onto objects, [2] that they refer to implicit arguments, and [3] that they introduce new objects, in virtue of their compositional semantics. In the second case, nominalizations do not add anything new but pick up objects that would (...) be present anyway in the semantic structure of a corresponding sentence without a nominalization. In the first and third case, nominalizations in a sense ‘create’ new objects’, enriching the ontology on the basis of the meaning of expressions. I will argue that there is a fourth kind of nominalization which requires a quite different treatment. These are nominalizations that introduce ‘new’ objects, but only partially characterize them. Such nominalizations generally refer to events or tropes. I will explore an account according on which such nominalizations refer to truth makers. (shrink)

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing (...) a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes. (shrink)

One of several problems concerning the possibility of mental causation is that the causal potential of a supervenient property seems to be absorbed by its supervenience base if that base and the supervenient property are not identical. If the causal powers of the supervenient property are a proper subset of the causal powers of the supervenience base then, according to the causal individuation of properties, the supervenience base seems to do all the causal work and the supervenient property appears to (...) be futile. Against this consequence it is possible to argue, first, that the relevant properties of causes must be in some sense proportional to the relevant properties of their effects and, second, that the principle of causal closure serving as a premise in the supervenience argument is probably false. The constraint that the relevant properties of causes should be proportional to the relevant properties of their effects together with the falsity of the closure principle leads to a restoration of the causal efficacy of supervenient properties. (shrink)

I defend the view that strong psychophysical superveniences is necessary and sufficient to explain the causal efficacy of mental properties. I employ factual and counterfactual conditionals as defeasible criteria of causal efficacy. And I also deal with certain problems arising from disjunctive and conjunctive properties.

The paper argues that mental causation can be explained from the sufficiency of counterfactual dependence for causation together with relatively weak assumptions about the metaphysics of mind. If a physical event counterfactually depends on an earlier physical event, it also counterfactually depends on, and hence is caused by, a mental event that correlates with (or supervenes on) this earlier physical event, provided that this correlation (or supervenience) is sufficiently modally robust. This account of mental causation is consistent with the overdetermination (...) of physical events by mental events and other physical events, but does not entail it. (shrink)

Recent worries about possible epiphenomenalist consequences of nonreductive materialism are misplaced, not, as many have argued, because nonreductive materialism does not have epiphenomenalist implications but because the epiphenomenalist implications are actually virtues of the theory, rather than vices. It is only by showing how certain kinds of mental properties are causally impotent that cognitive scientific explanations of mentality as we know them are possible.

How did I raise my arm? The simple answer is that I raised it as a consequence of intending to raise it. A slightly more complicated response would mention the absence of any factors which would inhibit the execution of the intention- and a more complicated one still would specify the intention in terms of a goal (say, drinking a beer) which requires arm-raising as a means towards that end. Whatever the complications, the simple answer appears to be on the (...) right track. (shrink)

The basic form of the exclusion problem is by now very, very familiar. 2 Start with the claim that the physical realm is causally complete: every physical thing that happens has a sufficient physical cause. Add in the claim that the mental and the physical are distinct. Toss in some claims about overdetermination, give it a stir, and voilá—suddenly it looks as though the mental never causes anything, at least nothing physical. As it is often put, the physical does all (...) the work, and there is nothing left for the mental to do. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim and others have claimed that (strong) psychophysical supervenience entails the reducibility of mental properties to physical properties. I argue that this claim is unwarranted with respect to epistemic (explanatory) reducibility (either of a global or of a local sort), as well as with respect to ontological reducibility. I then attempt to show that a robust version of nonreductive materialism (which I call supervenient token-physicalism) can be defended against the charge that nonreductive materialism leads to epiphenomenalism in failing to (...) account for the causal or explanatory relevance of mental properties. (shrink)

Nonreductive physicalism is currently one of the most widely held views about the world in general and about the status of the mental in particular. However, the view has recently faced a series of powerful criticisms from, among others, Jaegwon Kim. In several papers, Kim has argued that the nonreductivist's view of the mental is an unstable position, one harboring contradictions that push it either to reductivism or to eliminativism. The problems arise, Kim maintains, when we consider the causal powers (...) that mental properties are held to carry on the nonreductivist's view and the causal transactions into which mental events are said to enter. My aim here is less than that of defending nonreductive physicalism against all of Kim's criticisms. I wish primarily to call into question the claim that nonreductive physicalism is committed to emergentism with respect to the causal powers of the mental. As subsidiary points, I shall offer a limited defense of nonreductivism against two related objections that Kim raises. However, even if my conclusions are correct, problems remain for the nonreductivist's treatment of mental causation. I shall close the paper with a brief discussion of these difficulties. (shrink)

You may speak of a chain, or if you please, a net. An analogy is of little aid. Each cause brings about future events. Without each the future would not be the same. Each is proximate in the sense it is essential. But that is not what we mean by the word. Nor on the other hand do we mean sole cause. There is no such thing.

In _On The Soul_ (425a-b), Aristotle drew a distinction between those qualities that are perceptible only via a single sense and those that are perceptible by more than one. The latter qualities he called.

The primary aim of this research is to develop a new philosophical analysis of the concept of character that reflects the complexity of people and meets the demands of moral explanation. It places the agent's particular perspective and the wider context at the centre of moral judgement. The reason for undertaking this project is to establish an account of morality that is not in conflict with discoveries in empirical psychology. It responds to the challenge that the situation usually has the (...) explanatory role and that character traits rarely function as explanations for action. It argues that the best interpretation of the situationist position is that reasons would have to be features of the situation to separate the situationist argument from behaviourism. However, it argues that this would then commit the situationist to a controversial theory of action where what explains an action need not obtain. It argues that to evaluate a person or his action properly we need to tell an explanatory story and that this narrative construction is what best reflects the richness and complexity involved. It further argues that an adequate attribution of character to an individual will also take narrative form. Hence character traits can explain action because a narrative explanation of why an individual acted in a certain way can also be an explanation of why a certain character can be attributed to that person. It argues that narrative has central importance in the attribution of character traits because the narrative structure gives us an understanding of character that cannot be gained from a non-narrative presentation of the actions and events. This additional knowledge connects with the emotions important to moral evaluation of persons and actions. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue against the claim that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation. To accomplish this aim, I shall first briefly discuss the motivation behind agent causation. Second, I shall highlight the differences between agent causation and event causation. Third, I shall begin briefly with the weaker claim held by Timothy O’Connor and Randolph Clarke that there is no good reason to believe that event causation is more fundamental than agent causation. Fourth, I (...) shall discuss the stronger claim held by E. J. Lowe that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation, and raise objections against the various arguments Lowe advances for the stronger claim. To the extent that my objections against Lowe’s stronger claim succeed, they raise questions for O’Connor’s and Clarke’s weaker claim. (shrink)

This paper discusses attributively limited concrete objects such as disturbances (holes, folds, scratches etc), tropes, and attitudinal objects, which lack the sort of spatial location or part structures expected of them as concrete objects. The paper proposes an account in terms of (quasi-Fregean) abstraction, which has so far been applied only to abstract objects.

This article claims that events, facts and states of affairs need to be differentiated. It takes as a starting point Chisholm’s claim that only his ontology of states of affairs explains effectively thirteen sentences related to propositions and events. He does this by reducing propositions and events to states of affairs. We argue that our ontology also solves those problems. We defend a hierarchized Platonist ontology that has concrete entities and abstract entities. The distinctions we propose allow us to explain (...) the pre-analytic data analyzed by Chisholm without reducing entities. We claim that our ontology provides a different way of explaining that data, and is, thus, promissory. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a claim of metaphysical modality, in possession of good alethic standing, must be in want of an essentialist foundation. Or at least so say the advocates of the reductive-essence-first view, according to which all modality is to be reductively defined in terms of essence. Here, I contest this bit of current wisdom. In particular, I offer two puzzles—one concerning the essences of non-compossible, complementary entities, and a second involving entities whose essences are modally (...) ‘loaded’—that together strongly call into question the possibility of reducing modality to essence. (shrink)

This paper argues that a certain kind of substance dualism can adopt the ‘Compatibilist’ solution to the problem of causal exclusion. After sketching a non-Cartesian substance dualism akin to E.J. Lowe’s account, 5-23, 2006, 2008) and considering its shortcomings with respect to mental causation in section one, section two outlines an alternative account of mental causation and argues that this account solves the exclusion problem. Finally, section three considers a challenge to the proposed solution. With the exception of Lowe’s efforts, (...) very little in defense of substance dualist mental causation is to be found in the recent philosophical literature. (shrink)

We consider the so-called problem of the many, formulated by Peter Unger. It arises because ordinary material things do not have precise boundaries: it is always possible to find borderline parts of which it is not true to say either that they are parts or that they are not. Unger’s conclusion is that there are no ordinary things at all. We describe the solutions of Peter van Inwagen and David Lewis, and make some critical comments upon them. After that we (...) present our own suggestion which is based on ideas developed by Leibniz in connection with problems of unity and plurality. We suggest that what the problem of the many teaches us is that in order to understand what ordinary things are, we have to take seriously the Leibnizian-Kantian distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

Economists reason causally. Like many other scientists, they aim at formulating justified causal claims about their object of study. This thesis contributes to our understanding of how causal reasoning proceeds in economics. By using the research on the causes of unemployment as a case study, three questions are adressed. What are the meanings of causal claims? How can a causal claim be adequately supported by evidence? How are causal beliefs affected by incoming facts? In the process of answering these semantic, (...) epistemic and dynamical questions, the richness of causal reasoning in economics is brought to the foreground. In the part on semantics, it is argued that the meaning of causal generalizations in policy-oriented economics is best captured by using the concept of ‘inferential relation’ rather than the one of ‘referential relation’. This part contributes to develop an inferentialist semantics by distinguishing among types of inferential relations. In the part on epistemology, it is argued that justification in sciences like economics often relies, and ought to rely, on evidential variety―i.e. the combination of evidence from multiple sources. An interpretation of independence among evidential sources is offered: two evidential sources are fully independent if and only if the reasons why they would be unreliable do not overlap. It is then shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis does not hold under extreme circumstances. The part on dynamics focuses on deviant-case study. A storyline is provided for what deviant-case study aims at and how it proceeds in what is characterized as an ‘eclectic science’. (shrink)

If the wedding had taken place an hour later, it would have been rained out. When we make counterfactual claims like this, we indicate that events are not terribly fragile things. That is, we typically think of events as particulars which can survive small changes in nearby possible worlds, such that one and the same event could have occurred under slightly different circumstances. I argue, however, that any account of “non-fragile” event individuation is subject to what is known as the (...) recycling problem. This was a problem initially raised against origin essentialism, or the view that individuals are individuated by their origins, and is roughly the difficulty that arises in cases where the criteria of individuation for a particular individual are duplicated. I then examine a potential solution, which takes its cue from predecessor essentialism, the leading response to the recycling problem in the origins literature. I argue that the predecessor essentialist’s solution yields unacceptably counter-intuitive results when applied to the recycling problem for event individuation, and conclude that, if events have qualitative individuating essences, then they must be—contrary to intuition—modally fragile entities. I then suggest three alternatives to qualitative essentialism which could accommodate our intuitions about the modal non-fragility of events. (shrink)

Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

So selbstverständlich es klingt, vom Geist, der Psyche oder auch der Seele eines Menschen zu reden, und so vertraut uns wissenschaftliche Disziplinen sind, die sich philosophisch oder empirisch damit beschäftigen, so schwer fällt es, ein einheitliches Merkmale dafür anzugeben, wann etwas ein psychisches Phänomen ist. Viele der potentiellen Merkmale decken eben nur einen Teil des Spektrums dessen ab, was wir gewöhnlich als psychisch bezeichnen würden, und sind damit bestenfalls hinreichende, aber sicher keine notwendigen Bedingungen des Psychischen. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden (...) Artikels wird dagegen ein Merkmal stehen, von dem feststeht, daß es nicht hinreichend ist, von dem man aber vermuten kann, es sei zumindest notwendig: die Individualität psychischer Phänomene. Die Frage, mit der ich mich beschäftigen werde, ist, ob sich diese Vermutung mit Bezug auf eine Grnppe paradigmatisch psychischer Phänomene aufrecht erhalten läßt, die intentionalen Einstellungen. (shrink)

Twenty years ago Stephen Yablo developed his original theory of mental causation, which has drawn much attention ever since. By providing a detailed reconstruction of Yablo’s approach, this paper first demonstrates that a certain line of critique that has repeatedly been brought forward against Yablo over the last two decades misconstrues the core idea of the model. At the same time, the reconstruction reveals that Yablo’s approach is probably the first explicit version of the “new compatibilism” within the philosophy of (...) mind. This fairly young family of theories essentially claims a non-identity as well as a non-distinctness of mental and physical phenomena. The second part of the paper then demonstrates that the new compatibilist approaches in general, and Yablo’s theory in particular, even though they can resist much of the popular criticism, fall prey to a new theoretical trilemma once the nature of the respective analysantia is made explicit. Finally, a model of the psychophysical relation is developed that may allow the new compatibilists to escape the mentioned trilemma. (shrink)

Nexuses such as exemplification are the fundamental ties that structure reality as a whole. They are “formal” in the sense of constituting the form, not the matter of reality and they are “transcendental” inasmuch as they transcend the categorial distinctions between the denizens of reality, including that between existents and non-existents. I shall advocate a moderately particularist view about (external) nexuses and argue that it provides not only the best solution to Bradley’s regress, but also an elegant account of symmetrical (...) relations (both formal and material), as well as of temporal and modal change. These advantages are illustrated by the reconstruction of an Aristotelian ontology of exemplification involving substances, kinds and material attributes. (shrink)

A great deal has been written over the past decade defending ‘higher-level’ causes by arguing that overdetermination is more complex than many philosophers initially thought. Although two shooters overdetermine the death of a firing squad victim, a baseball and its parts do not overdetermine the breaking of a window. But while these analyses of overdetermination have no doubt been fruitful, the focus on overdetermination—while ignoring other varieties of causal relation—has limited the discussion. Many of the cases of interest resemble joint (...) causes or a cause necessitating a simultaneous epiphenomenon as much as they resemble overdeterminers. If we are to fully understand higher-level causation, we need to distinguish it from these causal relations as well. This paper is dedicated to the task, focusing especially on the ‘threat’ that higher-level causes are epiphenomena necessitated by lower-level causes. (shrink)

Supervenience physicalism attempts to combine non-reductionism about properties with a physical determination thesis in such a way as to ensure physicalism. I argue that this attempt is unsuccessful: the specific supervenience relation in question is either strong enough to ensure reductionism, as in the case of strong supervenience, or too weak to yield physical determination, as in the case of global supervenience. The argument develops in three stages. First, I propose a distinction between two types of reductionism, definitional and scientific, (...) a distinction thanks to which we can reply to a standard objection against the ontological reductionism of strong supervenience. Second, I claim that because of "the problem of random distribution," global supervenience needs strengthening to be an adequate relation to capture our physicalistic intuitions; and I show, in accordance with Stalnaker's relevant proof, why a natural strengthening of global supervenience renders it equivalent to strong supervenience. Finally, I argue against Stalnaker about the possibility of a non-reductionist global supervenience. The upshot is that despite appearances, supervenience physicalism is a form of reductive physicalism. (shrink)

Several debates in contemporary metaphysics provoke us to ask what an event is. One theory, Pioneered by chisholm, Develops the analogy between the occurrence of events and the truth of corresponding propositions. I call these propositional analyses. It is unclear whether their adherents wish to jettison our event-Concepts, And replace them with concepts from another category, Such as semantics. The other theory of what events are that I scrutinize, Namely kim's and goldman's property-Exemplification analysis, Seems reductive. My suspicion is that (...) if you attempt to boil down the occurrence of an event to the "obtaining" or "taking place" of a proposition-Like "state of affairs"--Or to the "exemplification" of a property by an "object"--At some "time", We have a residual event: a mysterious episode of "obtaining" or "exemplifying" in which either states of affairs or properties and objects participate. Reduction is unlikely. (shrink)

My first and main claim is that physics cannot provide empirical evidence for the objectivity of absolute becoming, for the simple reason that it must presuppose it, at least to the extent that classical spacetime theories presuppose an ontology of events. However, the fact that a theory of absolute becoming must be situated in the a priori realm of metaphysics does not make becoming completely irrelevant for physics, since my second claim will consist in showing that relational becoming, once appropriately (...) defined and understood, properly belongs to the tangled set of issues usually referred to with the label “the arrow of time”. In this respect it is argued that the arrow of becoming is more fundamental both than the causal arrow and of other well-known physical processes that are temporally asymmetric. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two types of mental causation, called 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation'. These notions superficially resemble the traditional problematic notions of supervenient causation and downward causation, but they are different in crucial respects. My new distinction is supported by a radically externalist competitor of the so-called Standard View of mental states, i.e. the view that mental states are brain states. I argue that on the Alternative View, the notions of 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation' can in combination dissolve (...) the problem of mental causation as standardly discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I present an analysis of causal relevance for properties. I believe that most of us are already familiar with the notion of a causally relevant property. But some of us may not recognize it "under that description." So I begin below with some intuitive explanations and some illustrative examples.

It is argued that experiences are complex events that befall their subjects. Each experience has a single subject and depends on the state or the event that it is of. The constituents of an experience are its subject, its grounding event or state, and everything that the subject is aware of during that time that's relevant to the telling of the story of how it was to participate in that event or be put in that state. The experience occurs where (...) the person having the experience is. An experience of an event or state occurs when that event or state makes a difference to its possessor's conscious life, where this difference is either a matter of really knowing what's happening or merely a matter of being affected. (shrink)

As two defining properties of mental phenomena, consciousness and intentionality have some deep connections. These connections may be either grounded by a more fundamental mental property, or governed by some bridge laws, or accepted as a brute unexplainable fact. This paper argues, on the one hand, that we do not have justifications for believing in the existence of a new fundamental mental property, although we have motivations for making an inference to such a new mental property. On the other hand, (...) this paper demonstrates that Husserl took these connections to be governed by some bridge laws and to be realized by the mapping function of what he called apprehension. (shrink)

John goes out for a walk. If John endures and his walk perdures, they are different entities. However, what if both John and his walk perdure? Is John’s walk identical to his relevant temporal part? Some philosophers answer in the affirmative. Their motivations rest on ontological parsimony and the quest for clear-cut identity criteria for existing things. By contrast, one of the most widely accepted theories of events – the theory of events as property-exemplifications – allows us to formulate an (...) argument to the effect that objects’ temporal parts are distinct from the events they participate in: the AID argument, as I shall call it. In this paper, I argue that accepting austere nominalism is the best strategy a supporter of the identification between events and temporal parts of objects can take in order to resist the AID argument. (shrink)

After defining presentism, I consider four arguments that presentism and divine atemporality are incompatible. I identify an assumption common to the four, ask what reason there is to consider it true, and argue against it.

In her recent paper, “A Defense of Substance Causation,” Ann Whittle makes a case for substance causation. In this paper, assuming that causation is a generative or productive relation, I argue that Whittle’s argument is not successful. While substances are causally relevant in causal processes owing to outcomes being counterfactually dependent upon their role in such occurrences, the real productive work in causal processes is accomplished by the causal powers of substances.

In a range of recent and not so recent work, I have developed a novel semantics of attitude reports on which the notion of an attitudinal object or cognitive product takes center stage, that is, entities such as thoughts claims and decisions. The purpose of this note is to give a brief summary of this account against the background of the standard semantics of attitude reports and to show that the various sorts of criticism that Felappi recently advanced against it (...) are mistaken. (shrink)

According to Kim, events are constituted by objects exemplifying property(ies) at a time. In this paper I wish to defend Kim's theory of events from one source of criticism, extending it by taking into account a number of ideas developed by Davidson. In particular, I shall try to avoid events proliferation – one of the most serious problems in Kim's theory – by using a suggestion Kim himself advances, that is, by taking adverbs and the like to be events' rather (...) than properties' modifiers. Keywords: events, properties, adverbs, modifiers. (shrink)

Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

Among the most well-known accounts of events is Jaegwon Kim’s exemplification theory, which identifies each event with a property exemplification. Two of the most influential rival event theorists have urged rejecting exemplificationism on the basis of the charge that it ultimately conflates events with facts [Lombard : Events: A Metaphysical Study. Routledge & Kegan Paul; Bennett :Events and their Names. Hackett Publishing Company]. In response, I offer a detailed examination of Lombard and Bennett’s arguments that exemplificationism undermines the event/fact distinction. (...) I then develop and defend a modified version of Kim’s account that overcomes this objection, and so constitutes a more plausible exemplification theory of events. (shrink)

Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies against the prevailing wind by arguing that we must pay (...) greater attention to which elements of our causal talk vary with context and which elements track genuine features of the world around us. I will argue that once these elements are teased apart we will be in a position to better understand some of the most persistent problems in the philosophy of causation: pre-emption cases, absence causation, failures of transitivity and overdetermination. The result is a naturalist account of causation, concordant with the contextual variability we find in our ordinary causal talk, and parsimonious with respect to the theoretical entities posited. (shrink)

The concept of event is one of the key notions of many theories dealing with causality or agency. In this paper we study different approaches to events that share the basic assumption that events can be analyzed fruitfully in branching-time structures. The terminological framework developed thereby may be helpful for further analyses in the fields of causality and agency and also in those fields of computational semantics, where similar concepts are considered.