2014/01/30 by S. C. Gibb, Sophie Gibb
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · #Philosophy and Theoretical Science #Philosophy and History of Science #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
paper · doi:10.1093/analys/ant117
How could mental entities causally affect, or be affected by, physical entities? Identifying a relationship between mental and physical entities that is both consistent with their causal interaction and independently plausible is one of the perennial problems in the philosophy of mind. In the contemporary mental causation debate, there is not one single problem of mental causation, but several. These include the problem of psychophysical causation generated by the causal closure argument, Davidson’s problem of how one can allow psychophysical causal interaction given the anomalism of the mental, Kim’s ‘pairing problem’ for substance dualists, and the problem of the causal relevance of mental content. In this article, I focus on the causal closure argument (because discussion of it has dominated the contemporary mental causation debate) and survey some of the important recent responses to it. I begin by considering the problem of mental causation that this argument presents for dualists and for physicalists (§1). I then survey non-reductive physicalist responses (§2) and dualist responses (§3).