سکوت

Introduction

All but one of the 14 essays gathered here have been published or written since 1993 when my earlier collection of essays, Supervenience and Mind, appeared. I have not included papers that have been used in my two monographs, Mind in a Physical World (1998) and Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough (2005). Most of the essays have appeared in print; these have received minor corrections and revisions,  and some cosmetic  touchups. Three are new and published here for the first time (Essays 6, 13, and 14). The essays have been written over many years, and in consequence they do not always speak in a unified voice on some matters. I have not done anything to retrospectively impose consistency and harmony; that would have been difficult and, in any case, pointless. Nor have I tried to eliminate overlapping material between some essays.

The essays collectively deal with a variety of issues, from emergence to action explanation to mental causation and special-science laws. Most of them have something to do with the metaphysical issues about the status of minds; a few are not comfortably grouped under the metaphysics of mind, as advertized in the title of the book. I can assure the reader, though, that even these have something to do with minds or metaphysics.

The book begins with four papers on emergence and emergentism. The idea of emergence, which goes back to the 19th century, saw its first flourishing in the early 20th century in the works of British emergentists, most notably Samuel Alexander and C.D. Broad. However, emergentism didn’t fare well during the mid-century when analytic philosophy was dominated by logical positivists and hyper-empiricists, and it was often held up for easy refutation, or outright ridicule. But the fundamental idea that animated the movement proved to have a remarkable staying power, finding friends among accomplished scientists as well as philosophers. The

idea of emergence seems to have a magical ability for attracting devotees, enthusiasts, and loyalists from every area of intellectual endeavor. Since around the 1980s, emergence has returned with a vengeance, with confer- ences and workshops seemingly everywhere and numerous books and special journal issues dedicated to the topic. Philosophers, theologians, scientists, and science writers seem to warm up to the idea of emergence and emergentism with enthusiasm and excitement, just as they recoil from reduction and reductionism with disdain and hostility. Most of them seem to look to emergentism as a promising middle ground that avoids the extremes of reductionist physicalism and serious dualism, as some of the early British emergentists did. It seems fair to say that emergentism has yet to gain full philosophical respectability, but it has long shed its cult-like status as a niche ideology. Whatever we think of it, it is a growing move- ment that cuts across many scientific fields, with many reputable thinkers on its side, and it is something to be reckoned with. I have had an interest in emergentism for some time, alternately intrigued by its promises and disheartened by its difficulties. It is the kind of philosophical view, or approach, that one wishes were correct, or at least coherent and workable. In spite of my predisposition to see the good side of emergentism, my work on emergence has been generally deflationary. “Making Sense of Emer- gence” is about the best I have been able to do for emergence and emergentism, but its overall message is pretty clearly on the negative side. Classical emergentism, of Broad and others, makes best sense in a layered ontology of the world, according to which reality is a hierarchically organized structure with distinct “levels,” from the micro to the macro, from atoms and molecules to cells and tissues and to organisms and minds. I don’t know when this kind of hierarchical model was first introduced, or by whom, but it is now a familiar picture. In “The Layered World: Metaphysical Considerations,” I explore various issues and problems that arise from this picture taken as a general ontology of the world. “Emer- gence: Core Ideas and Issues” raises further issues about the concept of emergence and argues that a robust positive characterization of the concept is yet to be formulated, and that “downward” causation, which arguably is emergentism’s very reason for existence, remains an unresolved metaphysi- cal difficulty. In the final paper on emergence, “‘Supervenient and Yet Not Deducible’: Is There a Coherent Concept of Ontological Emergence?” I try to make sense of the idea, found in C.D. Broad and many other writers, that

an emergent property is one that is supervenient on, or determined by, its “basal” conditions but not deducible from them. If my reasoning is generally correct, there is a serious doubt as to whether a coherent sense could be attached to the idea of ontological, or metaphysical, emergence (as distinguished from epistemic emergence). I believe this is the most seriously negative message I have delivered to the fans of emergence.

Next comes a pair of essays on action and action explanation, a topic I have thought about from time to time for many years. What has motivated me to think about the explanation, or understanding, of actions has been my dissatisfaction with the prevailing third-person theories like Carl Hempel’s nomological account and Donald Davidson’s causal view. The source of my dissatisfaction was simple: these approaches seemed just wrong, or at least irrelevant, when we consider the agent’s understanding of his own actions. Full agency of the sort we are capable of requires that we understand what we are doing, or why we are doing it, and when we lose this understanding, our agency can be seriously compromised, and can even be aborted. “Reasons and the First Person” was my initial attempt to argue for the importance of the first-person perspective in understanding actions. In “Taking the Agent’s Point of View Seriously in Action Explanation,” which is published here for the first time, I approach the issues in a more systematic way, by revisiting an old dispute between Carl Hempel and William Dray on the nature of historical explanations. As I say in the essay, this was really a dispute about explanation of human action and had nothing specifically to do with “historical” explanations. As is well known, Hempel argued that explanations of human actions, like explanations of natural events, come under his covering-law conception of explanation— namely that human actions are to be explained by subsuming them under general laws of human behavior. Dray defended a radically opposed view, arguing that there is a distinctively normative and evaluative aspect to reason-based explanations of actions, and that the understanding of why an agent did something consists in our seeing that the action was the right, or appropriate, thing to do in the circumstances. What I try to do is to construct, and defend,  a  normative  and  agent-centered  account  that  does  justice to Dray’s important insights. My account remains sketchy in many ways and there are important issues not adequately discussed or even raised; a full-fledged treatment would require a book-length work. I believe explanation of action continues to be a lively philosophical topic because understanding

why we do what we do is constitutive of our understanding of ourselves as reflective agents, and our interest in a theory of action explanation reflects our desire to understand how we understand ourselves.

This is followed by a group of papers on the general topic of explanation and related issues. “Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion” is an early paper in which I discuss the relationships between taking a realist view of explanation and causation and the proposition that multiple full explanations of a single event “exclude” one another. This was the first paper of mine to appear on the problem of exclusion (I remember that when I first introduced the term “exclusion,” I was thinking about Wolfgang Pauli’s “principle of exclusion” in particle physics, something I had heard from my physicist friends). What made me think about exclusion was a puzzle: If explanations are cognitive achievements of some kind, as they must be, why is it that multiple explanations of a single explanandum, or multiple distinct stories about how something came about, don’t seem like good news? These explanations seem to compete against one another and seem to create their own “epistemic predicament” for anyone considering them. During the past decade or so, discussions of the exclusion problem have turned away from explanatory exclusion and have almost exclusively focused on causal exclusion, and it is the latter that has lately received much intense attention, especially in the mental causation debates. For me, however, all this began with puzzles about explanation, and I wish I had done more work directly on exclusion as it applies to explanations. It is this issue that I find deeply intriguing; I think it has the potential to yield interesting insights into our ideas about explanation and understanding.

According to a well-worn platitude, science seeks not only to ascertain the events and facts of the world but also, more importantly, to achieve an understanding of why these facts hold and why the events occur as they do. In “Explanatory Knowledge and Metaphysical Dependence,” I set out some views on why we need a theory of explanation and what such a theory should be expected to deliver. Explanation of something is supposed to give us an “understanding” of the thing and make it “intelligible,” where this is taken to be an epistemic accomplishment of importance. I argue that above all, a theory of explanation should be a theory that tells us what this epistemic accomplishment is—what sort of cognitive gain is achieved when we come to understand something. That is, a theory of explanation must above all be a theory of understanding as a kind of knowledge. This means that

theory of explanation should be part of epistemology, with explanatory understanding as its central topic. But, as we know, traditional epistemology is completely silent on such issues. When we look at the active debate on explanation from around the middle of the last century through the ’80s, what we find is a plethora of “models” of explanation, with only scant attention paid to the question just how would-be explanations fitting these schematic models manage to explain. Almost invariably objections to these models took the form of counterexamples, and the purported counter- examples would be tested against unexamined raw intuitions. The correct procedure would have been to evaluate the worth of these models by considering whether and how they help generate explanatory understand- ing. Our primary need, then, is for a theory, not models, of explanation. I believe that this still is a valid comment on the way discussions about explanation are being carried on in philosophy of science.

In “Hempel, Explanation, Metaphysics,” given at an APA symposium in memory of Carl Hempel, my teacher at graduate school, I argue that if Hempel had been willing to use in his work on explanation some of the metaphysical tools that are now considered uncontroversial, he would have been able to sidestep many of the familiar objections and counterexamples against his views. His positivist commitments had severely restricted the range of concepts that he found philosophically acceptable, and he was not able to fend off even some of the simplest objections in a convincing way. This paper also contains a brief defense of a central thesis of Hempel’s theory of explanation that explanations are logical derivations or deductions. The title of “Reduction and Reductive Explanation: Is One Possible Without the Other?” says exactly what the paper is about. It has been quite common for philosophers to distinguish reduction and reductive explanation, with the assumption that even where reduction fails, reductive explanation is often possible and successful. The paper examines this assumption in some detail, with regard to three models of reduction, bridge-law reduction, identity reduction which replaces bridge laws with identities, and functional reduction based on functional analyses of properties to be reduced. I try to show that bridge-law reduction gives us neither genuine reduction nor reductive explanation, that identity reduction  gives  us  reduction  but not reductive explanation, and that functional reduction yields reductive explanation and, arguably, reduction as well.

During the past couple of decades, I probably have done as much work on mental causation as any other issue, and the next three papers concern mental causation in one way or another. As is well known, Davidson’s “anomalous monism” was taken to task by a number of critics, including myself, on the ground that it leads to epiphenomenalism of mental properties. In his “Thinking Causes,”1 Davidson attempted to rebut this criticism, arguing that he could save mental causation by appealing to mind-body supervenience and psychophysical laws that are not strict and exceptionless. “Can Supervenience and ‘Non-Strict’ Laws Save Anomalous Monism?” argues that Davidson’s replies all fail, and points to other problematic aspects of his views on the mind-body problem. This paper is part of my efforts to show that nonreductive physicalism, of which Davidson’s anomalous monism is a version, cannot account for mental causation. “Causation and Mental Causation,” written for Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind,2 is an overview statement of my current thoughts on mental causation.

Sydney Shoemaker is one of the many philosophers who believe that mental causation can be vindicated under nonreductive physicalism. In an important and admirable new book, Physical Realization,3 Shoemaker develops a defense of this position on the basis of what he calls the subset view of realization. On this approach, a property is a realizer of another just in case its causal powers include those of the latter as a subset. It is then argued that a property and its realizers don’t compete for causal status, and therefore that the causal powers of a mental property are not preempted, or excluded, by those of its physical realizers. In “Two Concepts of Realization, Physicalism, and Mental Causation,”4 I compare Shoemaker realization with the standard “second-order” account of realization, and try to show why I find Shoemaker’s treatment of mental causation less than fully satisfying, and why his overall view is best construed as a form of type physicalism, not nonreductive  physicalism.

I hope that the final essay “Why There Are No Laws in the Special Sciences: Three Arguments,” which is new, delivers what its title promises—at least,

1. In Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
2. Ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
3. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
4. Based on a paper presented at an APA book symposium on Shoemaker’s book in 2009; my symposium paper, “Thoughts on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization,” is to appear in Philosophical Studies.