Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

But the problem is not evaded: (i) if we accept
microlevel regularities as having a real—yet nonproductive—causal
role, why should we still hold that the
possibility of mental causation rests necessarily on that of
reduction? In fact, reducing and reduced phenomena do
not differ with respect to the “genuinity” of their causal
features; (ii) if we claim that real causation exists or
emerges only at higher levels, why is reduction of mental
phenomena to microphysical phenomena necessary, given
that the microworld lacks the essential feature which
secures and explains mental causation? To say that
causal relations emerge at higher levels does not help,
once entities and features of the microworld are taken as
paradigmatic and ontologically prior.
Far from regarding only Kim, the problem regards
Antony too. As mentioned, she fails to specify what she
means by physical causation. Nonetheless, she claims that
a physical model of causation is to be applied to mental
events. If by physical causation she means production, the
same objections against Kim hold. If she means something
different, mental causation is not different from, and no
more genuine than, microphysical causation.
5. Conclusion
The reason underlying Kim’s Reductive Physicalism and
Antony’s Non-Reductive Physicalism is that only the
mechanisms at work at the microlevel can secure and
explain the truth of psychological generalisations. I have
shown that, if the supposed feature that these
mechanisms should have, and that mental ones inherit
from them, is that they conform to a CQ model of causal
production, then psychological and microphysical laws are
on a par with respect to their causal features. In fact, there
are microphenomena not explainable in terms of
continuous sequences of causal intermediaries in
spacetime, as the CQ model requires.
Antony and Kim have gone to great effort to convince
us that—the possibility in principle of—a systematic
link between mental properties and regularities and physical
entities and mechanisms is necessary, because only
the latter, so they argue, can secure and explain the truth
of the explanations given by means of the former. But they
do not put the same effort in telling us on what features of
the microlevel, which the mental level lacks, the truth of
our psychological generalisations depends. I would urge
them to specify what it is that distinguishes physical
mechanisms from mental regularities, and renders the
former the secure basis for the latter, in order to convince
us about the necessity of their enterprises, whether
explanatorily or ontologically reductive.
40
Mental Causation and Physical Causation — Lorenzo Casini
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