Abstract
One of several problems concerning the possibility of mental causation is that the causal potential of a supervenient property seems to be absorbed by its supervenience base if that base and the supervenient property are not identical. If the causal powers of the supervenient property are a proper subset of the causal powers of the supervenience base then, according to the causal individuation of properties, the supervenience base seems to do all the causal work and the supervenient property appears to be futile. Against this consequence it is possible to argue, first, that the relevant properties of causes must be in some sense proportional to the relevant properties of their effects and, second, that the principle of causal closure serving as a premise in the supervenience argument is probably false. The constraint that the relevant properties of causes should be proportional to the relevant properties of their effects together with the falsity of the closure principle leads to a restoration of the causal efficacy of supervenient properties.
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Notes
In a lecture at the university of Tübingen in October 2005 on the relation between causation and laws Kim exactly stressed the dependence of causation on the existence of (strict) laws.
Here and throughout this paper I assume that the relata of causal relations are property instances or finely individuated events, i.e. objects exemplifying a certain property at a certain time (cf. Kim 1980). The proportionality constraint applies to these relata. It does not apply to causes understood as coarsely individuated events in Davidson’s sense (cf. Davidson 1967)
One might think that a common cause for their arriving simultaneously at the marketplace could lie in the past of A and B, for example it could be the Big Bang. But on the one hand this proposal would violate the proportionality constraint since if the relevant property of this event is supposed to be an explosion this property would be too unspecific in order to account for the simultaneity of the meeting of two specific persons. On the other hand it would be unclear which property of the big bang should be changed in order to generate different values of the time variable mentioned above. And even if we picked a certain property a change in this property would probably not be related systematically to changes in the time variable. The idea that at least the big bang is the common cause of everything seems to reflect the background assumption that causes are sufficient conditions. And it is exactly this understanding of causes that should be suspended.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Ausonio Marras and Bettina Walde for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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Schröder, J. Mental Causation and the Supervenience Argument. Erkenn 67, 221–237 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9066-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9066-x