Peter Menzies

(1953 - 2015)

This paper formulates a new argument that seems to show that physicalists must repudiate mental causation. The argument is related to Jaegwon Kim’s Exclusion Argument in that it relies on a crucial exclusion assumption about causation. This paper explores the extent to which this exclusion assumption is supported by different theories of causation. It argues that while a simple counterfactual theory of causation falsifies the assumption in its original form, it actually verifies a more plausible, reformulated version of the assumption under special conditions. The paper draws out some surprising consequences of this result. It argues that far from supporting the new exclusion argument against physicalism, the result actually vindicates the non-reductivist physicalist’s claim that the mental is causally autonomous with respect to the physical. The paper argues, however, that this result imposes constraints on the way in which a non-reductive physicalist can justify the causal autonomy of the mental.

In the history of modern philosophy systematic connections were assumed to hold between the modal concepts of logical possibility and necessity and the concept of conceivability. However, in the eyes of many contemporary philosophers, insuperable objections face any attempt to analyze the modal concepts in terms of conceivability. It is important to keep in mind that a philosophical explanation of modality does not have to take the form of a reductive analysis. In this paper I attempt to provide a response-dependent account of the modal concepts in terms of conceivability along the lines of a nonreductive model of explanation