Abstract
Some of the central issues in the ongoing debate on mental causation can be traced back to Donald Davidson’s original and controversial views on the role of mind in the causation and explanation of human behaviour. His classic 1963 paper ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ constituted something of a breakthrough in the old-standing controversy between the teleologists and the mechanists on the nature of action-explanation. Not onlycan reasons be causes — Davidson argued against the prevailing opinion of the Ryleans and neo-Wittgensteineans — but unless the reasons that ‘rationalize’ an action actually caused the action, those reasons would not serve to explain the action at all. (Those reasons are, of course, the agent’s beliefs and desires relative to which the action can be seen as reasonable or appropriate.) But while this basic thesis was widely endorsed, the 1963 paper did not contain an account of how reasons can be causes; that account was first given by Davidson in his far more controversial 1970 paper ‘Mental Events’.
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Notes
Following current practice, I refer to the view that individual mental events are causally inert as “token epiphenomanalism,” and to the view that mental properties (or types) are causally inert as “type epiphenomenalism” (cf. McLaughlin 1989).
To suppose that an event c, qua F, causes an event e, qua G, is, Davidson alleges, to turn the causal relation into a nonextensional relation holding between thefact of c’s being F and the fact of e’s being G. But, as both Kim (1993) and McLaughlin (1993) explain, their use of the “qua” or “in virtue of’ locutions has no such implication. McLaughlin, in particular, goes to great lengths to show that to say of an event that it caused what it did in virtue of certain of its properties is in no way incompatible with Davidson’s account ofthe causal relation as an extensional relation between individual events. To say that c caused e in virtue of certain of its properties is not to deny that c caused e: indeed, it is to affirm it. But it is, of course, to affirm more: it is to affirm that c caused e “because of something about each [event]” (p. 33), that is, because of the kinds of events c and e are. When we attribute “causal efficacy” to a property F of an event c that causes e, then, we are not thereby attributing to F the power to enter into causal relations with anything — a power that only their instances can have; rather, we are attributing to F the power to enter into some “appropriate relation” R (perhaps a lawlike relation) with some property G of e such that c causes e (an instance of G) because of the kind of event c is, namely, an instance of F: the fact of c’s being Fthus causally explains (but does not cause) the fact of e’s being G. Nonetheless, Davidson is probably right in charging that some of his critics may have conflated causation (as an extensional relation between events) with causal explanation (which intensionally relates properties or states of affairs); see, e.g. Kim (1990. pp. 39ff), where in discussing Davidson’s views he repeatedly refers to singular causal events by means of locutions of the form “c ‘s being an event of kind R (or c’s having property R) caused B” (where B is a token event).1
See, e.g., Stoutland (1985,p. 53), where he complains that according to AM “a reason causes an action only in virtue of its [nomic] physical properties...”
As Sosa (1993, pp. 46–47) notes, “a definition, or analysis, or general account of the causal relation [in terms of laws] would... make the causal relation dependent on laws connecting the properties (descriptions) of the events in question. And this would also make available a clear sense in which events would be causally efficacious because of their physical properties only and not at all because of their mental properties.” As Sosa is careful to point out, Davidson does not seek to provide any such definition, or analysis, or general account, of the causal relation.
Kim (1979) was the first to propose an account of mental causation based on supervenience. He has since given it up (regrettably, in my opinion; see Marras 1994).
For a demonstration that this formulation of the supervenience thesis is essentially equivalent to the Davidsonian version, see Kim (1984). It should be noted, however, that Davison’s preferred fomulation of the thesis is in terms ofpredicates rather than properties: “a predicate p is supervenient on a set of predicates S if and only if p does not distinguish any entities that cannot be distinguished by S” (1993, pp. 4–5, note 5). As he notes (ibid.), he intended the ‘Mental Events’ formulation to be euivalent to the present one.
Such a supevenience thesis would have to be at least as strong as Kim’s (1984) thesis of strong supervenience, whose formulation is like (S) except for containing an additional necessity operator before the last quantified clause. (The sense of ‘‘necessity’ here involved can be taken to be ‘nomological necessity’). The resulting modalized supervenience conditionals (‘necessarily, any event having a subvenient property P will have the supervenient property M) will insure that any mental event of this world will retain its mental properties in all nomologically possible worlds as long as it retains all of its physical properties.
Compare LePore and Loewer (1987) for a more general statement of this condition. They argue that this condition is too strong; for a response to their argument and a defense of the condition see Marras (1994). See also Louise Anthony (1987) for pertinent discussion. I should also point out that (C) rules out the kind of overdetermination that would be involved in supposing that Mthough not strictly necessary to e’s occurrence, might (so to say) “lend a helping hand” and thus earn its relevance from the manner of e’s occurrence. (I am grateful to Renée Bilodeau for alerting me to this possibility.)
The expression ‘screen off’ used by LePore and Loewer (1987).
On this point see Davidson (1970), Kim (1984), and Marras (1993).
I articulate my doubts in Marras (1994 and 1997b). The basic problem, in a nutshell, is that such psychophysical and psychological “laws” can ground the causal efficacy of mental properties only if we have independent reasons to believe that they are genuine empirical, causal laws. The mere fact that they have theform of a law does not guarantee that they are such: they could be mere law-like generalizations expressing non-empirical, normative principles of rational behaviour, or mere counterfactual-supporting regularities relating the effects of some common cause. Both possibilities would be consistent with type epiphenomenalism: for while such (noncausal) laws would enable us to predict the effects of mental causes, they would not enable us to explain those effects in terms of their causes’ being mental. Ironically, the way to deal with this problem is, I believe, to adhere to a Davidsonian distinction between basic physical laws and higher level “special science” laws (which is what the strict-law/nonstrict-law distinction is best viewed as trying to capture), and account for the causal character of psychological generalizations in terms of their implementation by physical mechanisms whose operation is grounded in basic physical laws (cf. Fodor 1989). The same strategy also enables us to reply to Sosa’s (1993) objection that an admission of non-strict laws as grounds for the efficacy of mental properties calls into question Davidson’s rationale for insisting on a strict-law requirement on causation (i.e., premise (P2) of the argument for AM): the rationale for the requirement is that basic physical laws are needed to ground the causal status of higher level, psychological generalizations (see Marras 1997a, 1997b).
I am grateful to Renée Bilodeau for insightful comments on the conference version of this paper. Thanks also to Raimo Tuomela for comments on my (1997a) review of Heil and Mele (1993), part of which provided the basis for the present paper. Support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Marras, A. (1999). Davidson on Intentional Causation. In: Fisette, D. (eds) Consciousness and Intentionality: Models and Modalities of Attribution. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_13
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