The Place of Mind in the Causal World

Abstract

Recently some philosophers have cast doubt on the causal relevancy of the mental. In particular, they complain that functionalism and anomalous monism fail to make the mental causally efficient. However, both the critics and the defenders of these views share a common picture of causation that generates the problem of mental causation : they sharply contrast causation with normativity or rationality and take it to be prior to and independent of our explanatory practice. Rejecting this assumption, this paper argues that there is a deep connection between psychological explanation and the attribution of causal powers of the mental.