On the Metaphysics of Mental Causation

Abstract

In a series of recent papers, Cynthia MacDonald and Graham MacDonald offer a resolution to the twin problems of mental causation and mental causal relevance. They argue that the problem of mental causation is soluble via token monism— mental events are causally efficacious physical events. At the same time, the problem of mental causal relevance is solved by combining this causally efficacious mental property instance with the systematic co-variation between distinct mental properties of the cause and the action-theoretic properties of the effect in question. In other words, their model is an instance of the familiar strategy of yoking token monism with property dualism. MacDonald and MacDonald, however, endorse this nonreductive monism from within a property exemplification account of events. In this paper we argue that nonreductive monism, when yoked with the property exemplification account, faces significant difficulties in resolving the twin problems of mental causation and mental causal relevance.