Jaegwon Kims Causation and Mental Causation chapter 11

Jaegwon Kim’s “Causation and Mental Causation” (chapter 11) is next.

Eliminative Materialism The human person (in fact, the entire universe) is entirely physical, AND There are no mental states of the standard folk psychological types (beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc. ).

The Basic Argument Folk psychology is a theory (either because every domain of thought is theoretical or because of the particular role played by FP). It’s a bad theory. We should not accept the existence of entities posited by bad theories. So, we should eliminate from our ontology the entities posited by folk psychology.

Qualification Churchland says it’s better to apply the argument to one kind of state at a time. There may be successful reduction (and thus NO elimination) in some cases but not in others. Propositional attitudes will most likely have to go, says Churchland, but not visual experiences of seeing color (or other sensory experiences).

Color Experiences The science of color experiences identifies distinctive neural states (ordered triplets of activation values of opponent-processing cells) that correspond to color experiences. So, color experiences can be reduced to physical states. Thus, they should not be eliminated from our ontology.

Propositional Attitudes Lots of nonhuman creatures think. They can’t learn symbolic systems that express propositions. Thus, they don’t think in terms of propositions. Our neural machinery is relevantly similar to theirs. So, our thinking isn’t propositional either.

Why Is This Argument Taken to Support Elimination? It is a central theoretical trait of beliefs and other propositional attitude states that they express propositions. If, for some given theoretical kind K, we have reason to believe(!) that there are no states with the central theoretical properties of K, then we should not believe in K’s.