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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Causally interacting mental events must be token-identical with physical events.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Causal efficacy can be grounded in higher-level causal powers without requiring token identity with lower-level physical events.
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    • 2.Non-reductive physicalists like Jaegwon Kim argue that if mental properties are causally efficacious, they must be reducible—but Davidson's token identity fails to secure this, yielding epiphenomenalism rather than genuine mental causation.
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    • 3.Token identity preserves mental causation in name only if the physical description, not the mental description, does all the nomological causal work.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Strict laws are not a necessary condition for singular causal relations, as argued by Donald Davidson's own account of cause, which permits causation without covering laws when properly understood.
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    • 2.If singular causation obtains independently of law-subsumption, mental events can cause physical events under their mental descriptions without needing to instantiate any physical property.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Causally interacting mental events must instantiate some strict law property (the cause-law principle).
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    • 2.Mental properties are not suitable for inclusion in strict laws (the anomalism principle).
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    • 3.Therefore, causally interacting mental events must instantiate some non-mental property suitable for strict laws.
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