Epiphenomenalism and Exclusion-A Solution to Kim's Problem

Robert Lantin

《真理大學人文學報》 1期 (2003/03) Pp. 191-204

https://doi.org/10.29962/TOJA.200303.0007

並列摘要

Epiphenomenalism has long been at the center of debates in the philosophy of mind. In its standard acception, the view entails the causal idleness of mentality in physical reality. What we think is causally irrelevant to what we do. Many philosophers have found this unacceptable. Yet, the view proves to be a very tough nut to crack indeed. In fact, if anything, contemporary research in cognitive psychology and the neurosciences tends to show that epiphenomenalism, or something very close to it, is probably true. In what follows, I want to argue that epiphenomenalism does ＂not＂ threaten our common sense understanding of mental causation. My contention rests on two claims: (i) given an appropriate theory of causation, epiphenomenalism provides mind-body correlations that are strong enough to validate common sense explanations of action and behavior; (ii) those correlations also solve the problem of mental causation by ＂doing away＂ with the troublesome cases of ＂mental-to-physical＂ and ＂mental-to-mental＂ causation, while retaining cases of ＂physical-to-mental＂ causation only. If I am correct, moreover, this perspective on mental causation at once solves what Jaegwon Kim has called ＂the problem of exclusion＂-namely, the problem of finding ＂non-redundant＂ causal work for mentality. To make my case, I'll look at causation theory, and show that there is no plausible interpretation on which epiphenomenalism threatens common sense. Quite the opposite: if I am right, epiphenomenalism provides common sense with the means to support its intentional explanations without violating a number of widely held metaphysical principles. In the first part of the paper (section I), 1 briefly introduce a number of basic notions, In the second part (section II), I look at causation theory and discuss its applications to epiphenomenalism and common sense. In the third, and last, part of the paper (section III), I propose a solution to Kim's problem of exclusion based on claims put forth in section II.