Defending mental causation by appealing to grounding

Abstract

Recently, Clark and Wildman have argued against a thesis about mental causation, due to Kroedel and Schulz, called the causal grounding thesis. A programmatic idea driving the causal grounding thesis is that instances of mental causation are always grounded by corresponding instances of purely physical causation. The causal grounding thesis goes beyond this programmatic idea by providing a substantial specification of how this occurs. The causal grounding thesis is of considerable philosophical interest because it is instrumental in Kroedel and Schulz’s attempt to develop non-reductive physicalism about the mind in such a way that the infamous exclusion problem is avoided. This paper extends Kroedel and Schulz’s defense of the causal grounding thesis and replies to Clark and Wildman’s concerns.