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Emerging from the causal drain

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Abstract

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.

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Notes

  1. Recently, Kim (2006b) has used the name “Supervenience argument” to refer to the first stage, and “Exclusion Argument” to refer to the second.

  2. This is supposed to be part of the concept of non-reductive physicalism, though O’Connor and Wong (2005) disagree.

  3. Kim recognises this objection but says, without explanation, that “we may assume, without prejudice, that no alternative physical base of M would have been available on this occasion”. This assumption may not be so innocent. List and Menzies (2009), for example, have argued that Exclusion may fail when there are alternative supervenience bases available. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will grant Kim this point.

  4. For example Loewer (2001); Crisp and Warfield (2001).

  5. Yes, one step in the chain from P to P* involves productive causation, but this will not help.

  6. I have deliberately used the rather vague locution “traceable to” so as to allow the possibility that views of causation such as those put forward by Woodward (2003), Hitchcock (2007), or Loewer (2007) might count as physical in Kim’s sense. These views, and others like them, see causation as a macroscopic phenomenon and deny its existence at the fundamental level. However all of these views trace macroscopic behaviour back to interactions at the fundamental level.

  7. See Corry (2006, 2009) for further discussion.

  8. Of course the composition laws may be non-trivial.

  9. McLaughlin (1992) has made a similar point.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Peter Menzies and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Correspondence to Richard Corry.

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Corry, R. Emerging from the causal drain. Philos Stud 165, 29–47 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9918-3

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