This essay develops the relation, implicit in Essay 11, of intentional action to behaviour described in purely physical terms; Davidson repeats from Essay 3 that an action counts as intentional if the agent caused it, and asks to which degree a study of action thus conceived permits being scientific. Davidson stresses the central importance of a normative concept of rationality in attributing reasons to agents ; because this concept has no echo in physical theory, any explanatory schema governed by the (...) concept is irreducible to physical theory. Davidson adduces several facts that prevent us from giving strict laws connecting reasons and action: first, we cannot give conditions that are not only necessary but also sufficient for an action to be intentional, using only the concepts of belief, desire, and cause----for we cannot specify the ”right way’ in which beliefs and desires cause actions ; second, a certain holism of the mental pervades explanations of human behaviour: we cannot assign beliefs and desires independently of and prior to the actions they cause, a point Davidson takes Ramsey’s work on subjective probability to have shown. Davidson appends a set of replies to critics, which clarify his attitude to psychology as a science, his analysis of statements of law, the principle of causal interaction, and the relation between mutually irreducible explanatory schema. (shrink)

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

This paper is about a puzzle which lies at the heart of contemporary physicalist theories of mind. On the one hand, the original motivation for physicalism was the need to explain the place of mental causation in the physical world. On the other hand, physicalists have recently come to see the explanation of mental causation as one of their major problems. But how can this be? How can it be that physicalist theories still have a problem explaining something which their (...) physicalism was intended to explain in the first place? If physicalism is meant to be an explanation of mental causation, then why should it still face the problem of mental causation? (shrink)

The Problems of Mental Causation. Functionalism in the philosophy of mind identifies mental states with their dispositional connections with other mental states, perceptions and actions. Many theories of the mind have sailed under the Functionalist flag. But what I take to be essential to Functionalism is that mental states are individuated causally: the reality of mental states depends essentially on their causal efficacy.

In this note, I will discuss one issue concerning the main argument of Mind in a Physical World (Kim, 1998), the Causal Exclusion Argument. The issue is whether it is a consequence of the Causal Exclusion Argument that all macro level causation (that is, causation above the level of fundamental physics) is an illusion, with all of the apparent causal powers of mental and other macro properties draining into the bottom level of physics. I will argue that such a consequence (...) would give us reason to reject the Causal Exclusion Argument. But there is also a stronger challenge, the charge that, if there is no bottom level of physics, the Causal Exclusion Argument has the consequence that “causal powers would drain away into a bottomless pit and there wouldn’t be any causation anywhere.” (81--page numbers that are not attributed to other works are to Kim, 1998). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1 Introduction 2 Events are Property‐Instances 3 Kim's Metaphysics and Semantics of Events 4 Kim's Inescapable Truism 5 How to Distinguish Events From Facts 6 Perfect and Imperfect Gerundial Nominals 7 Tropes That Are Not Events 8 Zonal Fusion of Events 9 Event‐Identity: Non‐Duplication Principles 10 Event‐Identity: Parts and Wholes 11 Events and the “by”‐locution 12 Events and Adverbs.

Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this..

Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind...

are synthetic a priori judgements possible?" In both cases, i~thas usually been t'aken for granted in fife one case by Kant that synthetic a priori judgements were possible, and in the other case in contemporary,'d-". philosophical literature that contingent statements of identity are ppss. ible. I do not intend to deal with the Kantian question except to mention:ssj~".

Lynne Rudder Baker and many others think that paradigmatic instances of one object constituting another—a piece of marble constituting a statue, or an aggregate of particles constituting a living body—involve two distinct objects in the same place at the same time. Some who say this believe in the doctrine of temporal parts; but others, like Baker, reject this doctrine. Such philosophers, whom one might call “coincidentalists”, cannot say that these objects manage to share space in virtue of sharing a temporal (...) part confined to just that place and time. But what can or should coincidentalists say about the nature of constitution? Many have analyzed the relation as one of sharing, “at some level”, all and only the same parts. Most have agreed that such massive part-sharing is at least a central component of and necessary condition for constitution. The heart of Baker’s Persons and Bodies, and its most significant contribution to the development of coincidentalism, is a theory of constitution that makes no appeal to mereology. The leading idea in Baker’s account is, instead, a modal one: objects belonging to constituted kinds are the necessary result of putting objects belonging to appropriate constituting kinds in the right circumstances, circumstances which the constituting objects need not have been in. So putting a piece of man-shaped marble in the right circumstances necessarily results in the existence of a second object, a statue, constituted by the marble; but the piece of marble need not have fallen into these circumstances or any others in which it would constitute a statue. (shrink)

Essence and causation are fundamental in metaphysics, but little is said about their relations. Some essential properties are of course causal, as it is essential to footprints to have been caused by feet. But I am interested less in causation's role in essence than the reverse: the bearing a thing's essence has on its causal powers. That essencemight make a causal contribution is hinted already by the counterfactual element in causation; and the hint is confirmed by the explanation essence offers (...) of something otherwise mysterious, namely, how events exactly alike in every ordinary respect, like the bolt'ssuddenly snapping and its snapping per se, manage to disagree in what they cause. Some prior difference must exist between these events to make their causal powers unlike. Paradoxically, though, it can only be in point of a property, suddenness, which both events possess in common. Only by postulating a difference in themanner — essential or accidental — of the property's possession is the paradox resolved. Next we need an account of causation in which essence plays an explicit determinative role. That account, based on the idea that causes should becommensurate with their effects, is thatx causesy only if nothing essentially poorer would have done, and nothing essentially richer was needed. (shrink)

Woodward's long awaited book is an attempt to construct a comprehensive account of causation explanation that applies to a wide variety of causal and explanatory claims in different areas of science and everyday life. The book engages some of the relevant literature from other disciplines, as Woodward weaves together examples, counterexamples, criticisms, defenses, objections, and replies into a convincing defense of the core of his theory, which is that we can analyze causation by appeal to the notion of manipulation.

The topic of this book is material objects. Like most interesting concepts, the concept of a material object is one without precise boundaries.

Nonreductive physicalism provides an appealing solution to the nature of mental properties. But its success as a theory of mental properties has been called into doubt by claims that it cannot adequately handle the problems of mental causation, as it leads either to epiphenomenalism or to thoroughgoing overdetermination. I argue that these apparent problems for the nonreductivist are based in fundamental confusion about causation and explanation. I distinguish two different types of explanation and two different relations to which they appeal: (...) causation and determination. I argue that these types of explanation do not compete with one another, nor do these relations jointly result in overdetermination. In closing I develop a nonreductivist solution to mental causation which avoids both the hazards of epiphenomenalism and of overdetermination and so demonstrates a way to save nonreductive physicalism from the problems of mental causation. (shrink)

I argue that our knowledge of the world's causal structure does not generate a sound argument for physicalism. This undermines the popular view that physicalism is the only scientifically respectable worldview.

The mind-body problem arises because of our status as double agents apparently en rapport both with the mental and with the physical. We think, desire, decide, plan, suffer passions, fall into moods, are subject to sensory experiences, ostensibly perceive, intend, reason, make believe, and so on. We also move, have a certain geographical position, a certain height and weight, and we are sometimes hit or cut or burned. In other words, human beings have both minds and bodies. What is the (...) relation between these? Religion often tells us that we are really embodied souls released at death from our bodily prisons. Could this be right? (shrink)

Reductionism is often understood to include two theses: (1) every singular occurrence that the special sciences can explain also can be explained by physics; (2) every law in a higher-level science can be explained by physics. These claims are widely supposed to have been refuted by the multiple realizability argument, formulated by Putnam (1967, 1975) and Fodor (1968, 1975). The present paper criticizes the argument and identifies a reductionistic thesis that follows from one of the argument's premises.

Let thin properties be properties shared by coincident entities, e.g., a person and her body, and thick properties ones that are not shared. Thick properties entail sortal properties, e.g., being a person, and the associated persistence conditions. On the first account of realization defined here, the realized property and its realizers will belong to the same individual. This restricts the physical realizers of mental properties, which are thick, to thick physical properties. We also need a sense in which mental properties (...) can be realized in thin physical properties shared by a person and her body. Defining this in turn requires defining a sense in which the instantiations of sortal properties and of thick properties are realized in micro‐structural states of affairs. A fourth notion of realization is needed to allow for the possibility of coincident entities that share a sortal property, e.g., coincident persons. (shrink)

Two of the assumptions that drive most contemporary philosophy of mind are the naturalistic thesis that minds, like mountains and molecules, are macro-objects in the natural order, involving nothing ‘spooky’, and a three-part taxonomy that recognizes substance dualism, property dualism, and monism as the available metaphysical options. Together, these assumptions drive most contemporary philosophers of mind to either monism of the materialistic stripe, or to a version of property dualism that treats mental properties on par with other macro-properties.

When two rocks shatter the window at once, what causes the window to shatter? Is the throwing of each individual rock a cause of the window shattering, or are the throwings only causes collectively? This question bears on the analysis of causation, and the metaphysics of macro-causation. I argue that the throwing of each individual rock is a cause of the window shattering, and generally that individual overdeterminers are causes.

Causation, says David Lewis now, is to be understood as the ancestral of counterfactual influence, where C influences E (roughly) iff little changes in C map onto big changes in E. I argue that the influence account provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for causation, and suggest that what is missing is the notion of effluence, or physical connection.

What conception of causation is at work in the law? I argue that the law implicitly relies on a contrastive conception. In a liability case where the defendant's breach of duty must be shown to have caused the plaintiff's damages, it is not enough to consider what would have happened if the cause had not occurredthe law requires us to look to a specific replacement for the effect, which in this case is the hypothetical outcome in which the plaintiff came (...) off better. In place of I suggest the more explicit An explicitly contrastive approach can thus potentially help the lawyer phrase her causal question in a more explicit way, while shedding light on our conception of causation. (shrink)