Aarhus University

External Lecturer, Center for Science Studies

Thesis Title: The Interventionist Solution to the Exclusion Problem of Mental Causation

About

PhD received February 2012.

My field of research is mental causation with particular focus on interventionist and contrastive accounts of causation and their potential for dealing with the exclusion problem for mental causal powers.

When I say that my desire to do a PhD at Macquarie University caused me to travel to Australia, I am assuming that my mental states can make a difference to my behaviour and the physical world. This is a common sense psychological assumption but it is also a fundamental assumption of scientific psychology. However, if we also assume that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, then there seems to be no causal work left for mental properties and thus no room for mental causation in the physical world.
Rejecting the assumption that beliefs, desires, intentions etc. cause the body to move would challenge our concept of voluntary action. Insofar as scientific psychological explanations involve mental causation, questioning the possibility of mental causation also questions the possibility of psychology making law-based explanations of human behaviour. A solution to the problem of causal exclusion thus seems vital for both the coherence of our common sense understanding of human agency and the nomological status of scientific psychology. In this way the issues of mental causation are of importance not only to philosophy but also to the fields of, for example, psychology, cognitive science, and psychiatry.

In my thesis I argue that the interventionist account of causation (Woodward 2003) provides a solution to the exclusion problem of mental causation.

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