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108 found
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  1. Specificity and Redundant Causation.Henning Strandin - manuscript
    In this paper I present a metaphysically minimalist but theoretically strong version of fact causation, in which the causal relata constitute a full Boolean algebra, mirroring the entailment relation of the sentences that express them. I suggest a generalization of the notion of multiple realizability of causes in terms of specificity of facts, and employ this in an interpretation of what goes on in cases of apparently redundant causation.
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  2. Kim�s toppling house of cards: An argument against the �micro-based property� solution.Lee-Anna Sangster - manuscript
    of (from British Columbia Philosophy Graduate Conference) In response to the “Causal Drainage” objection to his Supervenience Argument, Kim introduces micro-based properties and argues that their presence prohibits any causal drainage between metaphysical levels. Noordhof disagrees and instead argues that the causal powers of the �micro-bases� of micro-based properties seem to preempt the causal powers of micro-based properties, in much the same way as Kim claims the powers of subvening base properties preempt the powers of supervenient properties. Thus Noordhof argues (...)
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  3. The Timing Problem for Dualist Accounts of Mental Causation.Ben White - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    Setting aside all exclusion-style worries about the redundancy of postulating additional, non-physical mental causes for effects that can already be explained in purely physical terms, dualists who treat mental properties as supervening on physical properties still face a further problem: in cases of mental-to-mental causation, they cannot avoid positing an implausibly coincidental coordination in the timing of the distinct causal processes terminating, respectively, in the mental effect and its physical base. I argue that this problem arises regardless of whether one (...)
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  4. A Defence of Manipulationist Noncausal Explanation: The Case for Intervention Liberalism.Nicholas Emmerson - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3179-3201.
    Recent years have seen growing interest in modifying interventionist accounts of causal explanation in order to characterise noncausal explanation. However, one surprising element of such accounts is that they have typically jettisoned the core feature of interventionism: interventions. Indeed, the prevailing opinion within the philosophy of science literature suggests that interventions exclusively demarcate causal relationships. This position is so prevalent that, until now, no one has even thought to name it. We call it “intervention puritanism” (I-puritanism, for short). In this (...)
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  5. Are There Really Social Causes?August Faller - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (2):83-102.
    This article investigates the causal efficacy of social properties, which faces the following puzzle. First, for both intuitive and scientific reasons, it seems social properties have causal import. But, second, social properties are also characteristically extrinsic: to have some social property depends, in typical cases, on what one’s society is like around them. And, third, there is good reason to doubt that extrinsic properties make a genuine causal contribution. After elaborating on these three claims, I defend the following resolution to (...)
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  6. What's Wrong With Nonreductive Physicalism? The Exclusion Problem Reconsidered.Kevin Morris - 2023 - ProtoSociology 39:19-34.
    Jaegwon Kim argued that nonreductive physicalism faces the “exclusion problem” for higher-level causation, mental causation in particular. Roughly, the charge is that given the presumptive ubiquity of physical causation, there cannot be irreducible mental causes for physical effects. Since there are mental causes, Kim concluded that nonreductive physicalism should be rejected in favor of a more reductionist alternative according to which mental causes are just physical causes differently described. But why should mental causes be “excluded” in this way? Unfortunately, Kim (...)
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  7. Anti-reductionist Interventionism.Reuben Stern & Benjamin Eva - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):241-267.
    Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter, who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs (...)
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  8. Arrangements in Science and Mind.Richard Davies Gill - 2022 - Seatle: Amazon.
    This book is about trying to comprehend the mind from both scientific and philosophical standpoints. In recent years interest has revived in the difficult problem of consciousness. The many difficulties of understanding our minds have been considered in the past, mainly from philosophical or religious viewpoints, but only more recently from scientific perspectives. The book charts the landscape and proposes that the fundamental thing in the world is an arrangement, and this concept can encompass both material objects and things of (...)
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  9. Removing Realizers: Reply to Rellihan.Thomas Krödel - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (3):150-156.
    The paper replies to Matthew Rellihan’s recent criticism of Thomas Kroedel’s simple argument for downward causation. Rellihan argues that the simple argument equivocates between two notions of realizers of mental properties, namely total realizers and core realizers. According to Rellihan, one premise of the argument is false on each disambiguation. In response, this paper argues that the version of the argument in terms of total realizers is sound after all if we evaluate counterfactual conditionals about the non-occurrence of total realizers (...)
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  10. Modeling interventions in multi-level causal systems: supervenience, exclusion and underdetermination.James Woodward - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4):1-34.
    This paper explores some issues concerning how we should think about interventions (in the sense of unconfounded manipulations) of "upper-level" variables in contexts in which these supervene on but are not identical with lower-level realizers. It is argued that we should reject the demand that interventions on upper-level variables must leave their lower-level realizers unchanged– a requirement that within an interventionist framework would imply that upper-level variables are causally inert. Instead an intervention on an upper-level variable at the same time (...)
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  11. Why Causation is Biconditional but not Proportional.Lei Zhong - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (3):263-271.
    In this article, I defend a biconditional counterfactual account of causation, which places equal emphasis on what I call “the presence condition” and “the absence condition,” whereas Lewis's classical counterfactual theory focuses only on the absence condition. I attempt to show that biconditionalism provides a promising treatment of supervenient causation, namely, causal cases involving the supervenience relationship. Although some philosophers confuse this account with the proportionality constraint on causation, I argue that biconditionalism is distinct from and superior to proportionalism in (...)
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  12. The Causal Structure of Natural Selection.Charles H. Pence - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Recent arguments concerning the nature of causation in evolutionary theory, now often known as the debate between the 'causalist' and 'statisticalist' positions, have involved answers to a variety of independent questions – definitions of key evolutionary concepts like natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift; causation in multi-level systems; or the nature of evolutionary explanations, among others. This Element offers a way to disentangle one set of these questions surrounding the causal structure of natural selection. Doing so allows us to clearly (...)
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  13. The Josephson Junction.Ilexa Yardley - 2021 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory.
    What the Josephson Junction proves. The Josephson-Yardley 'connection.'.
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  14. Bayesian Networks and Causal Ecumenism.David Kinney - 2020 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):147-172.
    Proponents of various causal exclusion arguments claim that for any given event, there is often a unique level of granularity at which that event is caused. Against these causal exclusion arguments, causal ecumenists argue that the same event or phenomenon can be caused at multiple levels of granularity. This paper argues that the Bayesian network approach to representing the causal structure of target systems is consistent with causal ecumenism. Given the ubiquity of Bayesian networks as a tool for representing causal (...)
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  15. Intervention, Fixation, and Supervenient Causation.Lei Zhong - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (6):293-314.
    A growing number of philosophers are bringing interventionism into the field of supervenient causation. Many argue that interventionist supervenient causation is exempted from the fixability condition. However, this approach looks ad hoc, inconsistent with the general interventionist requirement on fixation. Moreover, it leads to false judgments about the causal efficacy of supervenient/subvenient properties. This article aims to develop a novel interventionist account of supervenient causation that respects the fixability requirement. The treatment of intervention and fixation that I propose can accommodate (...)
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  16. Grounding Relations Are Not Unified.James Dominic Rooney - 2019 - International Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1):57-64.
    Jonathan Schaffer, among others, has argued that metaphysics should deal primarily with relations of " grounding. " I will follow John Heil in arguing that this view of metaphysics is problematic as it draws on ambiguous notions of grounding and fundamentality that are unilluminating as metaphysical explanations. I understand Heil to be arguing that grounding relations do not form a natural class, where a 'natural' class is one where some member of that class has (analytic or contingent a posteriori) priority (...)
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  17. Grounding, mental causation, and overdetermination.Michael J. Clark & Nathan Wildman - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3723-3733.
    Recently, Kroedel and Schulz have argued that the exclusion problem—which states that certain forms of non-reductive physicalism about the mental are committed to systematic and objectionable causal overdetermination—can be solved by appealing to grounding. Specifically, they defend a principle that links the causal relations of grounded mental events to those of grounding physical events, arguing that this renders mental–physical causal overdetermination unproblematic. Here, we contest Kroedel and Schulz’s result. We argue that their causal-grounding principle is undermotivated, if not outright false. (...)
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  18. Difference-Making, Closure and Exclusion.Brad Weslake - 2017 - In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Huw Price (eds.), Making a Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 215-231.
    Consider the following causal exclusion principle: For all distinct properties F and F* such that F* supervenes on F, F and F* do not both cause a property G. Peter Menzies and Christian List have proven that it follows from a natural conception of causation as difference-making that this exclusion principle is not generally true. Rather, it turns out that whether the principle is true is a contingent matter. In addition, they have shown that in a wide range of empirically (...)
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  19. Semantic Normativity and Semantic Causality.Lei Zhong - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3):626-645.
    Semantic normativism, which is the view that semantic properties/concepts are some kind of normative properties/concepts, has become increasingly influential in contemporary meta-semantics. In this paper, I aim to argue that semantic normativism has difficulty accommodating the causal efficacy of semantic properties. In specific, I raise an exclusion problem for semantic normativism, inspired by the exclusion problem in the philosophy of mind. Moreover, I attempt to show that the exclusion problem for semantic normativism is peculiarly troublesome: while we can solve mental-physical (...)
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  20. The Super-Overdetermination Problem.John Donaldson - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Glasgow
    I examine the debate between reductive and non-reductive physicalists, and conclude that if we are to be physicalists, then we should be reductive physicalists. I assess how both reductionists and non-reductionists try to solve the mind-body problem and the problem of mental causation. I focus on the problem of mental causation as it is supposed to be faced by non-reductionism: the so-called overdetermination problem. I argue that the traditional articulation of that problem is significantly flawed, and I show how to (...)
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  21. Grounding mental causation.Thomas Kroedel & Moritz Schulz - 2016 - Synthese 193 (6):1909-1923.
    This paper argues that the exclusion problem for mental causation can be solved by a variant of non-reductive physicalism that takes the mental not merely to supervene on, but to be grounded in, the physical. A grounding relation between events can be used to establish a principle that links the causal relations of grounded events to those of grounding events. Given this principle, mental events and their physical grounds either do not count as overdetermining physical effects, or they do so (...)
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  22. Exclusion in Morality.Lei Zhong - 2016 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (2):275-290.
    Recently some philosophers suggested an exclusion problem for moral non-naturalism, which is similar to the exclusion problem in philosophy of mind. In this article, the author aims to advance the discussion of exclusion in morality by investigating two influential solutions to the exclusion problem: the autonomy solution and the overdetermination solution. The author attempts to show that the moral non-naturalist can solve the exclusion problem in a way that is different from the approach to solving mental-physical exclusion. First, the author (...)
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  23. Does same-level causation entail downward causation?Neil Campbell - 2015 - Abstracta 8 (2).
    I argue that Jaegwon Kim’s supervenience argument does not generalize to all special science properties by undermining his central intuition, employed in stage 1 of the argument, that there is a tension between horizontal causation and vertical determination. First, I challenge Kim’s treatment of the examples he employs to support this intuition, then I appeal to Kim’s own work on the metaphysics of explanation in order to dissipate the alleged tension.
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  24. A simple argument for downward causation.Thomas Kroedel - 2015 - Synthese 192 (3):841-858.
    Instances of many supervenient properties have physical effects. In particular, instances of mental properties have physical effects if non-reductive physicalism is true. This follows by a straightforward argument that assumes a counterfactual criterion for causation. The paper presents that argument and discusses several issues that arise from it. In particular, the paper addresses the worry that the argument shows too many supervenient property-instances to have physical effects. The argument is also compared to a similar argument that has been suggested by (...)
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  25. Supervenient Emergentism and Mereological Emergentism.Dwayne Moore - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (4):457-477.
    In recent years, emergentism has resurfaced as a possible method by which to secure autonomous mental causation from within a physicalistic framework. Critics argue, however, that emergentism fails, since emergentism entails that effects have sufficient physical causes, so they cannot also have distinct mental causes. In this paper I argue that this objection may be effective against supervenient emergentism, but it is not established that it is effective against mereological emergentism. In fact, after demonstrating that two founding emergentists, Samuel Alexander (...)
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  26. On the Metaphysics of Mental Causation.Dwayne Moore & Neil Campbell - 2015 - Abstracta 8 (2):3-16.
    In a series of recent papers, Cynthia MacDonald and Graham MacDonald offer a resolution to the twin problems of mental causation and mental causal relevance. They argue that the problem of mental causation is soluble via token monism – mental events are causally efficacious physical events. At the same time, the problem of mental causal relevance is solved by combining this causally efficacious mental property instance with the systematic co-variation between distinct mental properties of the cause and the action-theoretic properties (...)
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  27. Why the Counterfactualist Should Still Worry About Downward Causation.Lei Zhong - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (1):159-171.
    In Zhong (Philos Phenomenol Res 83:129–147, 2011; Analysis 72:75–85, 2012), I argued that, contrary to what many people might expect, the counterfactual theory of causation will generate (rather than solve) the exclusion problem. Recently some philosophers raise an incisive objection to this argument. They contend that my argument fails as it equivocates between different notions of a physical realizer (see Christensen and Kallestrup in Analysis 72:513–517, 2012). However, I find that their criticism doesn’t threaten the central idea of my view. (...)
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  28. Collective Responsibility and Group-Control.Andras Szigeti - 2014 - In Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.), Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Springer. pp. 97-116.
  29. Causally Redundant Social Objects: Rejoinder to Elder-Vass.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2014 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (6):798-809.
    In Elder-Vass’s response to my critical discussion of his social ontology, it is maintained (1) that a social object is not identical with but is merely composed of its suitably interrelated parts, (2) that a social object is necessarily indistinguishable in terms of its causal capacities from its interrelated parts, and (3) that ontological individualism lacks an adequate ontological justification. In this reply, I argue that in view of (1) the so-called redescription principle defended by Elder-Vass ought to be reformulated (...)
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  30. Causation is macroscopic but not irreducible.David Papineau - 2013 - In Sophie C. Gibb & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology. Oxford University Press. pp. 126.
    In this paper I argue that causation is an essentially macroscopic phenomenon, and that mental causes are therefore capable of outcompeting their more specific physical realizers as causes of physical effects. But I also argue that any causes must be type-identical with physical properties, on pain of positing inexplicable physical conspiracies. I therefore allow macroscopic mental causation, but only when it is physically reducible.
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  31. Emergent Causation.Simon Prosser - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 159 (1):21-39.
    Downward causation is commonly held to create problems for ontologically emergent properties. In this paper I describe two novel examples of ontologically emergent properties and show how they avoid two main problems of downward causation, the causal exclusion problem and the causal closure problem. One example involves an object whose colour does not logically supervene on the colours of its atomic parts. The other example is inspired by quantum entanglement cases but avoids controversies regarding quantum mechanics. These examples show that (...)
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  32. Counterfactuals, Regularity and the Autonomy Approach.Lei Zhong - 2012 - Analysis 72 (1):75-85.
    Many philosophers insist that the most plausible solution to the exclusion problem is to adopt the so-called ‘autonomy approach’, which denies either upward or downward causation between mental and physical properties. But the question of whether the autonomy approach is compatible with respectable theories of causation has seldom been discussed in the literature. This paper considers two influential theories of causation, the counterfactual account and the regularity account. I argue that neither the counterfactual theory nor the regularity theory can support (...)
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  33. Irreducibility and emergence in complex systems and the quest for alternative insights.Radmarz Hosseinie & Mojtaba Mahzoon - 2011 - Complexity 17 (2):10-18.
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  34. Questioning the Causal Inheritance Principle.Ivar Hannikainen - 2010 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 25 (3):261-277.
    Mental causation, though a forceful intuition embedded in our commonsense psychology, is difficult to square with the rest of commitments of physicalism about the mind. Advocates of mental causation have found solace in the causal inheritance principle, according to which the mental properties of mental statesshare the causal powers of their physical counterparts. In this paper, I present a variety of counterarguments to causal inheritance and conclude that the conditions for causal inheritance are stricter than what standing versions of said (...)
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  35. Emergent Causation and Property Causation.Paul Noordhof - 2010 - In Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind. Oxford University Press.
  36. Locke's Exclusion Argument.Walter Ott - 2010 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 27 (2):181-196.
    In this paper, I argue that Locke is not in fact agnostic about the ultimate nature of the mind. In particular, he produces an argument, much like Jaegwon Kim's exclusion argument, to show that any materialist view that takes mental states to supervene on physical states is committed to epiphenomenalism. This result helps illuminate Locke's otherwise puzzling notion of 'superaddition.'.
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  37. Non‐committal Causal Explanations.David Pineda - 2010 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (2):147-170.
    Some causal explanations are non-committal in that mention of a property in the explanans conveys information about the causal origin of the explanandum even if the property in question plays no causal role for the explanandum . Programme explanations are a variety of non-committal causal (NCC) explanations. Yet their interest is very limited since, as I will argue in this paper, their range of applicability is in fact quite narrow. However there is at least another variety of NCC explanations, causal (...)
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  38. Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays.Ernest Sosa (ed.) - 2010 - Cambridge University Press.
    Jaegwon Kim is one of the most pre-eminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect facts and events, the analysis of supervenience, and the mind-body problem. A central problem in the philosophy (...)
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  39. Can Counterfactuals Solve the Exclusion Problem?Lei Zhong - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (1):129-147.
    A quite popular approach to solving the Causal Exclusion Problem is to adopt a counterfactual theory of causation. In this paper, I distinguish three versions of the Causal Exclusion Argument. I argue that the counterfactualist approach can block the first two exclusion arguments, because the Causal Inheritance Principle and the Upward Causation Principle upon which the two arguments are based respectively are problematic from the perspective of the counterfactual account of causation. However, I attempt to show that the counterfactualist approach (...)
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  40. Reduction and emergence: a critique of Kim.Paul Needham - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 146 (1):93-116.
    In a recent critique of the doctrine of emergentism championed by its classic advocates up to C. D. Broad, Jaegwon Kim (Philosophical Studies 63:31–47, 1999) challenges their view about its applicability to the sciences and proposes a new account of how the opposing notion of reduction should be understood. Kim is critical of the classic conception advanced by Nagel and uses his new account in his criticism of emergentism. I question his claims about the successful reduction achieved in the sciences (...)
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  41. Anomalism and supervenience: A critical survey.Oron Shagrir - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2):pp. 237-272.
    The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’, and, in particular, that there are no strict psychophysical laws. On the other hand, (...)
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  42. Causal Inheritance and Second-order Properties.Suzanne Bliss & Jordi Fernández - 2008 - Abstracta 4 (2):74-95.
    We defend Jaegwon Kim’s ‘causal inheritance’ principle from an objection raised by Jurgen Schröder. The objection is that the principle is inconsistent with a view about mental properties assumed by Kim, namely, that they are second-order properties. We argue that Schröder misconstrues the notion of second-order property. We distinguish three notions of second-order property and highlight their problems and virtues. Finally, we examine the consequence of Kim’s principle and discuss the issue of whether Kim’s ‘supervenience argument’ generalizes to all special (...)
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  43. Causation and Determinable Properties : On the Efficacy of Colour, Shape, and Size.Tim Crane - 2008 - In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 176-195.
    This paper presents a puzzle or antinomy about the role of properties in causation. In theories of properties, a distinction is often made between determinable properties, like red, and their determinates, like scarlet (see Armstrong 1978, volume II). Sometimes determinable properties are cited in causal explanations, as when we say that someone stopped at the traffic light because it was red. If we accept that properties can be among the relata of causation, then it can be argued that there are (...)
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  44. Mental Causation: The Mind-Body Problem.Anthony Dardis - 2008 - Columbia University Press.
    Anthony Dardis shows how to unravel the knot. He traces its early appearance in the history of philosophical inquiry, specifically in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and T. H. Huxley.
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  45. Levels, orders and the causal status of mental properties.Simone Gozzano - 2008 - European Journal of Philosophy 17 (3):347-362.
    In recent years Jaegwon Kim has offered an argument – the ‘supervenience argument’ – to show that supervenient mental properties, construed as second- order properties distinct from their first-order realizers, do not have causal powers of their own. In response, several philosophers have argued that if Kim’s argument is sound, it generalizes in such a way as to condemn to causal impotency all properties above the level of basic physics. This paper discusses Kim’s supervenience argument in the context of his (...)
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  46. Mental causation as multiple causation.Thomas Kroedel - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (1):125-143.
    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 (...)
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  47. The Supervenience Argument, Overdetermination, and Causal Drainage: Assessing Kim’s Master Argument.Sven Walter - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (5):673 – 696.
    This paper examines Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience Argument (SA) against nonreductive physicalism, concentrating on Kim's response to two of the most important objections against the SA: First, the Overdetermination Argument, according to which Kim has no convincing argument against the possibility that mental causation might be a case of genuine or systematic overdetermination; second, the Generalization Argument, according to which the SA would entail that causation at any level gives way to causation at the next lower level, thereby leading to an (...)
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  48. The Supervenience Argument.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & Ausonio Marras - 2008 - In S. Gozzano & F. Oralia (eds.), Universals, Tropes and the Philosophy of Mind. Ontos Verlag. pp. 101-132.
  49. Top-down causation without top-down causes.Carl F. Craver & William Bechtel - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (4):547-563.
    We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. When interlevel (...)
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  50. CHAPTER 2. The Supervenience Argument Motivated, Clarified, and Defended.Jaegwon Kim - 2007 - In Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press. pp. 32-92.
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