Mental Causation and the Determination Relation

Abstract

Stephen Yablo's influential article "Mental Causation" made an interesting new move in the philosophical debate about the exclusion problem about mental causation. He observed that (i) determinables are not excluded from causal influence by their determinates; and (ii) the relation of mental properties to their underpinning neural properties is analogous to, if not identical with, the relationship of determinables to determinates. In this paper I argue that Yablo's observations do not have the force that he thought they had. Nonetheless, his observations point in the direction of a more satisfactory way of answering the exclusion problem in terms of contrastive causation.