Jaquan Kim’s Arguments on Mental Causation

Vocabulary flashcards covering the key concepts, arguments, and terminology regarding mental causation as presented in the lecture on Jaquan Kim.

Jaquan Kim

The philosopher and textbook author famous for the exclusion and supervenience arguments regarding mental causation dating back to the 1980s.

Supervenience Argument

Kim's argument that if one accepts both mental-to-mental causation and supervenience, they must also accept mental-to-physical causation.

Exclusion Argument

Kim’s more complex argument that suggests mental events must be identical to physical events to avoid problematic overdetermination in the physical world.

Radical Epiphenomenalism

The claim that there is no mental-to-mental causation and that the mental is entirely along for the ride without having any causal power.

Mental-to-Physical Causation

The process where a mental event, such as a desire to scratch, causes a physical event, such as the act of scratching.

Supervenience

The claim that a mental state depends entirely on an underlying physical state, such that no possible world exists where that specific brain state occurs without the corresponding mental state occurring.

Nonreductive Physicalism

A view that accepts supervenience but holds that mental events and physical events are distinct rather than identical.

Identity Theory

Also known as reductive physicalism, this view holds that every mental event is identical to a specific physical event.

Counterfactual

A claim about how things would have happened had a specific cause not occurred; used to explain causation through dependence.

Sufficient Cause

A cause that not only contributes to an effect but also guarantees the outcome, potentially governed by laws of physics.

Principle of Causal Closure

The principle stating that every physical event which has a cause at time $t$ has a sufficient physical cause at time $t$.

Physical Causal Determinism

The thesis that every single physical event has a sufficient physical cause, differing slightly from Kim's closure principle which only applies if an event has a cause.

Overdetermination

A rare scenario where an event has two or more distinct sufficient causes occurring at the same time, such as a firing squad.

Exclusion Principle

The rule that no event has two or more distinct sufficient causes at the same time unless it is a genuine and rare case of overdetermination.

Downward Causation

The causation of physical events by non-identical mental events, a concept central to emergentism.

Anomalous Monism

A view holding that there are no law-like relations between mental states and physical states.

Quantum Indeterminacy

A concept in physics where certain events at the quantum level are indeterminate, which Kim's critics argue may conflict with the Principle of Causal Closure.