6 - Making sense of mental causation

Summary

Implicit in a number of views we have already discussed is the idea that a proper understanding of the nature of causation leads one to individualism. For example, Fodor claims that global individualism follows from relatively uncontroversial claims about causal explanation (Chapter 2); McGinn considers his analysis of causal factors into powers and parameters to be a ‘rather elementary’ point about causation (Chapter 5). But thus far we have not focussed on the intuition behind such views: that making sense of mental causation requires accepting individualism.

There are two complementary parts to this intuition. One part is the idea that denying individualism commits one to unacceptable views about mental causation. For example, it has been said that denying individualism is tantamount to positing ‘action at a distance’ in psychology, commits one to the existence of ‘crazy causal mechanisms,’ and ‘violates supervenience’. These claims have found their way into the philosophical subconscious and contribute to the intuitive pull that individualism has for many philosophers. If denying individualism committed one to any of these views, individualism would be compelling, if only by default, in much the way that it is often held that some version of materialism about the mind must be true because the various forms of dualism are metaphysically unacceptable. In §1 I state the arguments for and in §2 offer responses to each of these three related objections to the denial of individualism.

The flip side to these objections is the idea that individualism itself follows from a basic and unobjectionable claim about causation: that causation is loca.