Mental Causation Practice Flashcards

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers key concepts, historical figures, and philosophical arguments regarding mental causation and agency as discussed in chapter seven of Kim's book.

Mental Causation

The philosophical problem and study of how mental states, such as beliefs and desires, can cause physical actions and vice versa.

Substance Dualism

The view, historically associated with Descartes, that the mental and the physical are two distinct substances with entirely different natures.

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia

The historical figure who challenged Descartes by questioning how a mental substance and a physical substance could possibly interact if they are entirely distinct.

Efficient Causation

An Aristotelian type of explanation where a prior event causes a future event to happen through force or energy.

Final Causation

A type of explanation involving intrinsic purposes or functions, which the Enlightenment era largely rejected in favor of quantifiable physical interactions.

Monads

According to Leibniz, these are distinct substances that are causally independent of one another and exist in a prearranged harmony set by God.

Panpsychism

In the context of the lecture on Spinoza, the belief that the mental and the physical are basically the same thing within one single substance.

Agent

Someone with the capacity to perform actions for reasons, distinguishing a purposeful action from a mere happening.

Belief-Desire-Action Principle

The principle that if an agent $s$ desires something and believes that doing $a$ is an optimal way of securing it, then $s$ would do $a$.

Objective Reasons

Justifications for an action that exist independently of whether the agent specifically acted upon them, such as it being in one's best interest.

Subjective Reasons

The specific internal justifications or motivations that an agent actually picks out as the reason they performed a particular action.

Donald Davidson

The philosopher who argued that for reasons to explain behavior, they must be efficient causes of that behavior.

Eliminativism

A form of total anti-realism that suggests there is no inner mental life and that only outer behavior and observable facts exist.

Epiphenomenalism

The view that mental events are real but do not cause physical events, often compared to a passenger on a train who has no control over the train's movement.

Automata

A term cited by Huxley to describe beings that act on their own like preprogrammed machines, despite being conscious.

Samuel Alexander

An emergentist who argued against epiphenomenalism, claiming that if the mind had no work to do, it would not have survived natural selection.

Anomalous Monism

Donald Davidson's view that while only physical substances exist (monism), there are no strict psychophysical laws (anomalous) connecting the mental and physical.

Psychophysical Laws

Strict, exceptionless laws that would link physical states to mental states or vice versa, the existence of which is denied by anomalous monism.

Counterfactual Account of Causation

An account that defines causation by the claim that if the cause $a$ had not happened, the effect $b$ would not have occurred.

Possible World Approach

A method for evaluating counterfactuals by determining what happens in the nearest possible world where the cause is absent.