Two property theories and the causal conundrum for physicalism

1. Jaegwon Kim has done as much as anyone to make us aware of the challenge of finding a place in the causal nexus for mental properties. There are many ways of setting the problem up, but at the heart of all the ways is the point that although we physicalists can and should allow that mental properties supervene on physical properties – the kinds of properties that figure in the physical sciences – there are strong arguments against identifying mental properties with physical properties. But it is physical properties that stand in causal relations to events in our world. Or, if we count properties that supervene on physical properties as being thereby physical, the problem is that there are strong arguments against identifying mental properties with any of the physical properties that stand in causal relations to events in our world. Either way, we seem to end up with mental properties as epiphenomenal. This is highly counterintuitive and, as many note, ironical. One of the main reasons for embracing physicalism about the mind in the first place is the conviction that mental properties stand in causal relations to events in our world and to each other and that the kinds of properties dualists traffic in do not. It is the bogey of epiphenomenalism that convinces so many of us that some style of physicalism must be true. There is a huge literature on this problem and little consensus. My excuse for entering the fray (again) is that I think the reason we philosophers have found the problem so hard is that many of us went wrong right near the beginning. The strong arguments against identifying mental properties with physical properties, or – the other way of saying it – the strong arguments against identifying mental properties with any of the physical properties that stand in causal relations to events in our world, succeed against only one kind of mental property, and it is other kinds that stand in causal relations.