Eric Marcus Mental Causation in a Physical World

It is generally accepted that the most serious threat to the possibility of mental causation is posed by the causal self-sufficiency of physical causal processes. I argue, however, that this feature of the world, which I articulate in principle I call Completeness, in fact poses no genuine threat to mental causation. Some find Completeness threatening to mental causation because they confuse it with a stronger principle, which I call Closure. Others do not simply conflate Completeness and Closure, but hold that Completeness, together with certain plausible assumptions, entails Closure. I refute the most fully worked-out version of such an argument. Finally, some find Completeness all by itself threatening to mental causation. I argue that one will only find Completeness threatening if one operates with a philosophically distorted conception of mental causation. I thereby defend what I call naïve realism about mental causation. Contemporary philosophers of mind work within the constraints imposed by the following platitude: Ours is a physical world. The question is then raised: Is there any work for mental causes to do in a physical world? This question is typically answered in one of two ways: naturalistically or skeptically. Amongst those who think that an affirmative answer is tenable, it is often assumed that such an answer requires naturalism – typically, in some form of identity theory or functionalism. Amongst those who think that an affirmative answer is untenable (perhaps because of the failure of the first strategy), the question gives rise to skepticism about mental causation – typically, in some form of epiphenomenalism or eliminativism. If these are our options, we are left with the following dilemma: Either mental causation just is (ultimately) physical causation, or it’s nothing at all. I think this reckoning leaves out a plausible and attractive option, which I have elsewhere called naïve realism about mental causation.1 According to this view, we can maintain an intuitively satisfying form of realism about mental causes while denying that the mind’s efficacy can be reconstructed from ingredients provided © Springer 2005 Philosophical Studies (2005) 122: 27–50