Topic:  Anti-Metaphysical Reactions

Baker’s “Metaphysics and Mental Causation”

*Baker identifies 3 metaphysical features that are in the background of the problem of mental causation, as she sees it:

    1) All reality depends on physical reality.  (Supervenience?)
    2) Causation is an objective relation that holds independent of explanatory interests.
    3) All cases of behavior are events with content-property causes.

“The problem of mental causation”:  ‘How can content-properties of internal events be causally relevant to producing behavioural events?’ (p. 76)

    --Dretske’s comparison to the breaking glass.

    --The problem is worsened when conjoined with the assumption that all explanation (of behavior, at least) is causal explanation.

*Baker claims that, given these assumptions, the problem is insoluble.

*Baker’s line of argument:  These worries can generalize to rule out all macro-causation.  So, we can either give up on macro-causation (and macro-explanations), or reject the assumptions (premises) that lead to this conclusion.  Baker opts for the latter.

1.

*Baker will set aside the worries about content-properties being causally inefficacious because they are relational. (p. 78)

*Baker claims that two metaphysical theses “generate the problem of mental causation”:

    1. Materialism (roughly characterized in terms of supervenience)

    --Baker criticizes Global Supervenience, and favors a Strong Supervenience understanding of Materialism.  (Note the 5
    features of her SS discussed on pp. 81-82.)

    2. Causal Closure of the Physical (p. 78)

    “Thus, for any event that has a physical property—whether or not it has mental or other properties—there are sufficient
    physical conditions for its occurrence and for its having all of its physical properties.” (pp. 78-79)

    --Baker notes that this closure principle is not plausible for higher-level “physical” properties.  So, ‘physical’ should be replaced
    with ‘micro-physical’.

2.

*Baker discusses the example of Jill making a bid with her eyebrow.  Assume that some neurological event was sufficient for this eyebrow movement.  Even assuming that this neurological event “realizes” a desire to make a bid, it does not follow that this desire was causally relevant to the behavior. (pp. 83-84)  (Again, recall the Dretske example.  Baker adds another example:  the New York Times example.)

*Good question:  “So, what would entitle one to conclude that the desire to make a bid was causally relevant to the eyebrow movement?” (p. 84)

    --Baker offers a principle P, but this principle succumbs to obvious, epiphenomenal counter-examples.

    --Baker dismisses P, but does not attempt to look for an alternative principle of causal relevance!

    --Baker summarizes the discussion up to now:  “All significant versions of materialism (I think) are committed to CCP and SS;
    yet, given CCP and SS, there seems no way to avoid the unhappy conclusion that content-properties have never explained any
    behaviour, and hence that no explanation of behaviour in terms of an agent’s reasons has ever been correct.” (p. 86)

        --But let’s ask ourselves:  What argument (straw man argument, even) has Baker presented for the conclusion that
        content-properties are epiphenomenal?  (E.g., doesn’t she need to add an exclusion principle to this argument, or some
        reasonable standard of causal relevance, etc.?)

3.

*Baker claims that the metaphysical problem generalizes to all macro-causation, because there is nothing in her argument specific to intentionality, etc.

    --We finally see Baker hinting at an exclusion principle on p. 87:
    “If every instantiation of every property has a complete micro-physical cause, what room is there for macro-causation?”

    --Baker rejects Kim’s supervenient (or epiphenomenal) causation proposal (P’).  She argues that this picture has
    epiphenomenal counter-examples (!), and all the causal work is obviously done at the lowest level. (p. 88)

4.

*Baker opts to save special science causation, and must then (she thinks) abandon CCP or SS.  Her focus will be on CCP, but she also states that she has problems with SS.  The only problem with SS that she mentions seems a bit bizarre:

    “Since I do not believe that we will ever be in a position to trace very many (if any) property instantiations to any micro-physical
    base, SS seems to me to be idle speculation.” (p. 91)

*So, what does Baker think is wrong with CCP?  Baker claims that causation is not an objective relation, in the sense of one of Kim’s statements about objectivity.  (p. 91)  Baker provides counter-examples to this characterization on p. 92.

    Q:  Has Baker only defeated a “straw man”?

*Instead of the objective, metaphysical account of causation, Baker suggests that our actual (successful) explanatory practices trump our metaphysical commitments.

    “My suggestion is to take as our philosophical starting-point, not a metaphysical doctrine about the nature of causation or of
    reality, but a range of explanations that have been found worthy of acceptance . .. Construing explanations as answers to ‘why’
    questions, with perhaps some constraints on what count as an adequate answer, my proposal is to begin with explanations that
    earn their keep, rather than with the metaphysics, which seems to me a freeloader that just interferes with real work.” (pp.
    92-93)

On Baker’s picture, explanation (epistemology) is more basic than causation (metaphysics? more epistemology?).
 

Fodor’s “Special Sciences:  Still Autonomous after all these Years”

*What is an autonomous science?:  “I will say that a law or theory that figures in bona fide empirical explanations, but that is not reducible to a law or theory of physics, is ipso facto autonomous; and that the states whose behavior such laws or theories specify are functional states”

*Fodor is concerned with Kim’s argument that psychological “kinds” aren’t legitimate kinds because they aren’t projectible.  Fodor thinks that psychological kinds are projectible (e.g., they occur in psychological laws, which are irreducible and hence autonomous).

Jade

*Kim takes jade to be a paradigmatic multiply realized (MR) kind, and hence unprojectible.  E.g., there aren’t any laws like “jade is green.”

    --Fodor claims that in Kim’s example of jade, Kim has not proven the unprojectibility of jade.  A simple sampling error explains
    the failure of the positive instances to confirm the purported law.

*Fodor goes on to give a more charitable formulation of Kim’s argument:

    “But, now, according to the functionalist orthodoxy, pain is just like jade, isn’t it?  So, then:  “Why isn’t pain’s
    relationship to its realization bases Nh, Nr, Nm analogous to jade’s relation to jadeite and nephrite? … If pain is nomically
    equivalent to N, the property claimed to be wildly disjunctive and obviously nonnomic, why isn’t pain itself equally
    heretogeneous and nonnomic as a kind? (15, quoted emphasis Kim’s).”

Rebuttal

*Fodor argues that jade is not projectible because there are no laws (or general truths) about “jade as such.”

    “Whatever is reliably true of jade is reliably true of jade either because it is reliably true of jadeA as such or because it is
    reliably true of jadeB as such.”

*Pain differs from jade in that the former is disjunctively realized, and the latter is a multiply based property that is disjunctive.

*Fodor claims that Kim is mistaken in thinking that whatever possesses certain macrophysical, observable properties is jade.  Fodor insists that jade is truly disjunctive in that it just is the disjunction of jadeA and jadeB.  We can’t create new types of jade by making something else that satisfies these observable properties.  Functional properties are different—if you create something that fits the functional description of some functional kind, you’ve created an instance of that kind.

*“Functionalists are required to deny that pain is identical to the disjunction of its realizers.  The reason they are is that it’s part of their story that the functional property realized, but not its physical realizer, is projectible.”

    --Fodor argues that a proposed identity between functional properties and the disjunction of their possible realizers is ruled out
    because such a list is gerrymandered.

    --And open disjunctions aren’t projectible because:
    “To offer a law of the form R1 v R2 v … --> Q is to invite the charge that one has failed correctly to identify the property in
    virtue of which the antecedent necessitates the consequent.”

*I’m particularly interested in Fodor’s comments at the end of the paper.

Conclusion (molto mysterioso)

*Assuming pain to be MR, should we expect psychological “laws” about human pain (e.g., that it causes anxiety) to generalize to Martians with radically different pain realizers?  Kim thinks not.

*Here’s a long, interesting passage by Fodor, characterizing what he takes to be Kim’s worry (though Kim doesn’t realize it as such):

    “The very existence of the special sciences testifies to reliable macrolevel regularities that are realized by mechanisms whose
    physical substance is quite typically heterogeneous.  Does anybody really doubt that mountains are made of all sorts of stuff?
    Does anybody really think that, since they are, generalizations about mountains-as-such won’t continue to serve geology in good
    stead?  Damn near everything we know about the world suggests that unimaginably complicated to-ings and fro-ings of bits and
    pieces at the extreme microlevel manage somehow to converge on stable macro-level properties.

    On the other hand, the ‘somehow’ really is entirely mysterious, and my guess is that that is what is bugging Kim.  He just
    doesn’t see why there should be (how there could be) macrolevel regularities at all in a world where, by common consent,
    macrolevel stabilities have to supervene on a buzzing, blooming confusion of microlevel interactions.  Or rather, he doesn’t see
    why there should be (how there could be) unless, at a minimum, macrolevel kinds are homogeneous in respect of their
    microlevel constitution.  Which, however, functionalists in psychology, biology, geology and elsewhere, keep claiming that they
    typically aren’t.

    So, then, why is there anything except physics?  That, I think, is what is really bugging Kim.  Well, I admit that I don’t know
    why. I don’t even know how to think about why.  I expect to figure out why there is anything except physics the day before I
    figure out why there is anything at all, another (and, presumably, related) metaphysical conundrum that I find perplexing.”

*“Here, for once, metaphysics actually matters, so philosophers don’t get to choose.  Science postulates the kinds that it needs in order to formulate the most powerful generalizations that its evidence will support.  If you want to attack the kinds, you have to attack the generalizations.”