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ABSTRACT
The Exclusion Argument has afflicted non-reductionists for decades. In this article, I attempt to show that emergentism—the view that mental entities can downwardly cause physical entities in a non-overdetermining way—is the most plausible approach to solving the exclusion problem. The emergentist approach is largely absent in contemporary philosophy of mind, because emergentism rejects the Causal Closure of Physics, a doctrine embraced by almost all physicalists. This article, however, challenges the consensus on causal closure and defends a physicalist version of emergentism. On closer examination, I find that neither physical evidence nor physicalist considerations can satisfactorily support causal closure. Moreover, I argue that two competing approaches that accept causal closure, compatibilism and autonomism, involve ad hoc postulations of mental causation. Therefore, all things considered, emergentism is the best option available to non-reductive physicalists.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The notion of ontological dependence has been characterized in terms of different metaphysical relations, such as supervenience, realization, and grounding. While it is generally agreed that supervenience is a minimal requirement for physicalism, many philosophers complain that supervenience is insufficient for the characterization of physicalism: realization and grounding seem to be more robust than supervenience for physicalist purposes. But this disagreement doesn’t matter much to the main points of this essay.
2 Here I use the term ‘causal overdetermination’ in a broad sense: to say that A and B causally overdetermine the effect E is just to say that A and B are two distinct and sufficient causes of E.
3 Reductive physicalism is standardly formulated as a thesis of type identity (namely, identities between mental and physical properties) rather than a thesis of token identity (that is, identities between mental and physical events). To accommodate the commonly held view that token identity doesn’t entail type identity, this article adopts a coarse-grained conception of events, according to which distinct properties could be instantiated by the same event.
4 It is worth noticing that the literature on causal overdetermination often adopts a coarse-grained conception of events. For example, in the fire squad case, the effect is assumed to be a coarse-grained event—that is, the death of the victim. But if the effect is described as a more fine-grained event—say, the death of the victim by two bullets—then it is not a case of causal overdetermination, but rather a case of causal cooperation. This might be another problem with the compatibilist approach. For more discussion of this issue, see Bishop [2012].
5 Some believe that scarlet is also the cause of touching. Their reason might be that scarlet is nomologically sufficient for touching. If the pigeon will touch an object whenever its colour is red, it follows that the pigeon will touch an object whenever the colour is scarlet (or any particular shade of red). However, as I will discuss later, nomological sufficiency is not sufficient for causation.
6 Autonomism talks about the new parallel between the higher-level and the fundamental (instead of the old parallel between the mental and the non-mental). For this reason, autonomism could be regarded as neo-parallelism.
7 Notice that the existence of such cases is compatible with the downward causation principle, which says that normally A will cause the subvenient property of B if A causes B.
8 If a proportionality account of causation—according to which the cause should be neither too general nor too specific to the effect—is true, the autonomist approach might be less ad hoc. See Zhong [2014].
9 Here we adopt a coarse-grained conception of events, according to which the same event can instantiate different properties. But if a fine-grained conception of events is instead adopted, then the conserved quantity theory of event causation would be more controversial. Both compatibilism and autonomism—which agree that mental events can cause other events—seem to be inconsistent with the conserved quantity account of event causation if events are understood in a fine-grained way. According to the fine-grained conception of events, the non-identity between mental and physical properties would imply that mental events are distinct from physical events. If so, mental events don’t transfer conserved physical quantities and hence fail to cause anything.
10 If mental powers were not physically grounded, then probably the physical domain would be causally incomplete (supposing that non-physical forces can causally influence physical entities) [Lowe Citation2000; Bishop Citation2006]. This approach against Closure, however, conflicts with the framework of physicalism that this article accepts.
11 Closure itself doesn’t entail the conclusion and is compatible with the possibility of overdetermination. But, in order to reach this conclusion, Papineau already assumes that there is no systematic mental-physical overdetermination.
12 This might be closer to Papineau’s position. Elsewhere [2001: 3], he says that physicalism is the view that everything is physically constituted.
13 Papineau might think that Closure motivates a version of physicalism, which disallows that physical entities causally depend on non-physical entities. This version of physicalism is weaker than reductive physicalism, but more robust than minimal physicalism. I will discuss this issue later in this section.
14 I would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees of this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.