The Entailment Problem and the Subset Account of Property Realization

Proponents of the subset account of property realization commonly make the assumption that the summing of properties entails the summing of their forward-looking causal features. This paper seeks to establish that this assumption is false. Moreover, it aims to demonstrate that without this assumption the fact that the subset account captures an entailment relation—which it must if it is to be of any use to non-reductive physicalism—becomes questionable.     

Causal Powers, Realization, and Mental Causation

Sydney Shoemaker has attempted to save mental causation by a new account of realization. As Brian McLaughlin argues convincingly, the account has to face two major problems. First, realization does not guarantee entailment. So even if mental properties are realized by physical properties, they need not be entailed by them. This is the first, rather general metaphysical problem. A second problem, which relates more directly to mental causation is that Shoemaker must appeal to some kind of proportionality as a constraint on causation in order to avoid redundant mental causation. I argue that, in addition, a “piling problem” arises, since causal powers seem to be bestowed twice. Then, I try to sketch an alternative view of the relation between causal powers and properties—a reductionist view—which fares better on some accounts. But it may have to face another and, perhaps, serious problem, the “problem of the natural unity of properties”. Finally, I will pose a question about the relation between causal powers and causation.

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Determinable Properties and Overdetermination of Causal Powers

Do determinable properties such as colour, mass, and height exist in addition to their corresponding determinates, being red, having a mass of 1 kilogram, and having a height of 2 metres? Optimists say yes, pessimists say no. Among the latter are Carl Gillett and Bradley Rives who argue that optimism leads to systematic overdetermination of causal powers and hence should be rejected on the grounds that the position is ontologically unparsimonious. In this paper I defend optimism against this charge by showing that overdetermination of causal powers cannot plausibly be avoided when grounding what I call joint powers. It is therefore not clear why the optimist should be worried about the overdetermination of causal powers that follows from positing determinable properties.     

A Simulacrum Account of Dispositional Properties

This essay presents a model‐theoretic account of dispositional properties, according to which dispositions are not ordinary properties of real entities; dispositions capture the behavior of abstract, idealized models. This account has several payoffs. First, it saves the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. Second, it preserves the general connection between dispositions and regularities, despite the fact that some dispositions are not grounded in actual regularities. Finally, it brings together the analysis and the explanation of dispositions under a unified framework.     

Powers, causation, and modality

A complex theory concerning powers, natures, and causal necessity has emerged from the writings of P. H. Hare, E. H. Madden, and R. Harré. In the course of rebutting objections that other critics have raised to the power account of causation, I correct three of its genuine difficulties: its attempt to analyze power attributions in terms of conditional statements; its characterization of the relation between something's powers and its nature; and its doctrines concerning conceptual necessity. The resulting interpretation of causal modalities is then subsumed under a more general power account of modality, related at a number of points to considerations concerning powers, and further illustrating their philosophical importance.     

Powers,Probabilities, and Tendencies

Philosophia - In this article, I aim at showing how powers may ground different types of probability in the universe. In Section 1 I single out several dimensions along which the probability of...     

Emergence,Reduction and the Identity and Individuation of Powers

Topoi - One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers....     

Revelation,Consciousness+ and the Phenomenal Powers View

Topoi - Revelation is roughly the thesis that we have introspective access to the essential nature of our conscious states. This thesis is appealed to in arguments against physicalism. Little...     

Horror,Fear, and the Sartrean Account of Emotions

Phenomenological approaches to affectivity have long recognized the vital role that emotions occupy in our lives. In this paper, I engage with Jean‐Paul Sartre's well‐known and highly influential theory of the emotions as it is advanced in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. I examine whether Sartre's account offers two inconsistent explications of the nature of emotions. I argue that despite appearances there is a reading of Sartre's theory that is free of inconsistencies. Ultimately, I highlight a novel reading of Sartre's account of the emotions: one that is both phenomenologically accurate and supported by textual evidence.     

Powers,Non‐Consent and Freedom

There are a number of dispositionalist solutions to the free will problem based on freedom consisting in the agent's exercise of a power. But if a subject a is free when they exercise their power P, there is an objection to be overcome from the possibility of power implantation. A brainwasher, rather than directly manipulating a subject's movements, can instead implant in them a desire, to be understood as a disposition to act, and allow the subject to exercise such a power. It seems that, according to the dispositionalist theory of freedom, such an agent would still count as acting freely. There is a strong non‐consent intuition that a is not free in such a case because they did not consent to having the power P—the desire in question. Filling out this intuition is not straightforward. But it can be done in terms of the exercise of P being regulated by higher‐order powers of self‐reflection. Such regulation is what allows an agent to either take ownership of a power or to reject it.     

Neuroscience, the Person, and God: An Emergentist Account

Strong forms of dualism and eliminative materialism block any significant dialogue between the neurosciences and theology. The present article thus challenges the Sufficiency Thesis, according to which neuroscientific explanations will finally be sufficient to fully explain human behavior. It then explores the various ways in which neuroscientific results and theological interpretations contribute to an overall theory of the person. Supervenience theories, which hold that mental events are dependent on their physical substrata but not reducible to them, are explained. Challenging the determinism of "strong" supervenience, I defend a version of "soft" supervenience that allows for genuine mental causation. This view gives rise in turn to an emergentist theory of the person. Still, I remain a monist: there are many types of properties encountered in the world, although it is only the one nature that bears all these properties. The resulting position, emergentist monism , allows for diversity within the context of the one world. This view is open at the top for theological applications and interpretations while retaining the close link to neuroscientific study and its results. Theology offers an interpretation of the whole world based on a yet higher order of emergence, although the notion of God moves beyond the natural order as a whole. It therefore supplements the natural scientific study of the world without negating it.     

Emergence and Causal Powers

This paper argues that the non-reductive monist need not be concerned about the ‘problem’ of mental causation; one can accept both the irreducibility of mental properties to physical properties and the causal closure of the physical. More precisely, it is argued that instances of mental properties can be causally efficacious, and that there is no special barrier to seeing mental properties whose instances are causally efficacious as being causally relevant to the effects they help to bring about. It is then shown that the causal relevance of mental properties is consistent with there being no downward causation, so the dilemma of ‘epiphenomenalism or reduction’ can be avoided. Non-reductive monism lives on as a viable position in the philosophy of mind.

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Intuition's Powers and Perils

One of the biggest revelations of recent psychological science is the two-track human mind, which features not only a deliberate, self-aware “high road” but also a vast, automatic, intuitive “low road.” Through experience, we learn associations that provide fast and frugal intuitions that enable instantaneous social judgments and the pattern recognition that marks acquired expertise. But as studies of implicit prejudice and intuitive fears illustrate, unchecked gut feelings can also lead us astray. Intuition's powers and perils appear in various realms, from sports to business to clinical and interviewer judgments.     

Nonreductive Physicalism and the Causal Powers of the Mental

Nonreductive physicalism is currently one of the most widely held views about the world in general and about the status of the mental in particular. However, the view has recently faced a series of powerful criticisms from, among others, Jaegwon Kim. In several papers, Kim has argued that the nonreductivist's view of the mental is an unstable position, one harboring contradictions that push it either to reductivism or to eliminativism. The problems arise, Kim maintains, when we consider the causal powers that mental properties are held to carry on the nonreductivist's view and the causal transactions into which mental events are said to enter. My aim here is less than that of defending nonreductive physicalism against all of Kim's criticisms. I wish primarily to call into question the claim that nonreductive physicalism is committed to emergentism with respect to the causal powers of the mental. As subsidiary points, I shall offer a limited defense of nonreductivism against two related objections that Kim raises. However, even if my conclusions are correct, problems remain for the nonreductivist's treatment of mental causation. I shall close the paper with a brief discussion of these difficulties. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Subset selective search on the basis of color and preview

In the preview paradigm observers are presented with one set of elements (the irrelevant set) followed by the addition of a second set among which the target is presented (the relevant set). Search efficiency in such a preview condition has been demonstrated to be higher than that in a full-baseline condition in which both sets are simultaneously presented, suggesting that a preview of the irrelevant set reduces its influence on the search process. However, numbers of irrelevant and relevant elements are typically not independently manipulated. Moreover, subset selective search also occurs when both sets are presented simultaneously but differ in color. The aim of the present study was to investigate how numbers of irrelevant and relevant elements contribute to preview search in the absence and presence of a color difference between subsets. In two experiments it was demonstrated that a preview reduced the influence of the number of irrelevant elements in the absence but not in the presence of a color difference between subsets. In the presence of a color difference, a preview lowered the effect of the number of relevant elements but only when the target was defined by a unique feature within the relevant set (Experiment 1); when the target was defined by a conjunction of features (Experiment 2), search efficiency as a function of the number of relevant elements was not modulated by a preview. Together the results are in line with the idea that subset selective search is based on different simultaneously operating mechanisms.     

Realization,explanation and the mind-body relation

The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze throughout the history of its use, we encounter numerous responses to the question of “what” phenomenon it circumscribes ranging from cognitive functions (e.g., “spatial learning”, “spatial navigation”), to representational changes (e.g., “cognitive map formation”) to terms that appear to refer exclusively to observable changes in behavior (e.g., “water maze performance”). To date philosophical analyses of the water maze have not been directed at sorting out what phenomenon the device delineates nor the sources of the different answers to the question of what. I undertake both of these tasks in this paper. I begin with an analysis of Morris’s first published research study using the water maze and demonstrate that he emerged from it with an experimental learning paradigm that at best circumscribed a discrete set of observable changes in behavior. However, it delineated neither a discrete set of representational changes nor a discrete cognitive function. I cite this in combination with a reductionist-oriented research agenda in cellular and molecular neurobiology dating back to the 1980s as two sources of the lack of consistency across the history of the experimental and review literature as to what is under study in the water maze.     

Affect,Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza's Account of Motivation

Two priority problems frustrate our understanding of Spinoza on desire [cupiditas]. The first problem concerns the relationship between desire and the other two primary affects, joy [laetitia] and sadness [tristitia]. Desire seems to be the oddball of this troika, not only because, contrary to the very definition of an affect (3d3; 3 General Definition of the Affects), desires do not themselves consist in changes in one's power of acting, but also because desire seems at once more and less basic than joy and sadness. The second problem concerns the priority of desires and evaluative judgements. While 3p9s and 3p39s suggest that evaluative judgements are (necessarily) posterior to desires, Andrew Youpa has recently argued that passages in Ethics 4 indicate that rational evaluative judgements can give rise to, rather than arise out of, desires. I aim to offer solutions to these problems that reveal the elegance and coherence of Spinoza's account of motivation. Ultimately, I argue that whereas emotions and desires stand in a non-reductive, symmetrical relationship to one another, evaluative judgements must be understood as asymmetrically dependent on, and reducible to, emotions or desires. This interpretation sheds light on our understanding of Spinoza's cognitivist account of emotion. For Spinoza, while emotions are representational, they are not underpinned by evaluative judgements. Rather than inflating emotions to include evaluative judgements, he deflates evaluative judgements, treating them as emotions, or valenced representations, and nothing more.