Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2015
Publication Title
Humana Mente
First Page
141
Last Page
166
Additional Publication URL
http://www.humanamente.eu/index.php/55
Abstract
Most philosophical debate over mental causation has been concerned with reconciling commonsense intuitions that there are causal interactions between the mental and the physical with philosophical theories of the nature of the mental that seem to suggest otherwise. My concern is with a different and more practical problem. We often confront some cognitive, affective, or bodily phenomenon, and wonder about its source – its etiology or its underlying causal basis. For instance, you might wonder whether your queasiness due to something you ate, or whether it is just nervousness, or whether your aunt’s memory loss is a neurological problem or a psychological response to trauma. Such questions attempt to localize the causes of a phenomenon at some level in the complex multi-level systems that we human animals are. In this paper I will attempt to tease out the sense of level implicit in such questions, and to show how it is related to current mechanistic accounts of levels. I will argue that the explanation of our practices of level attribution is deeply pragmatic. Such attributions are often attempts to locate the causes of problems, and to identify interventions that could solve those problems.
Rights
Originally published under a Creative Commons License in Humana Mente, December 2015, Volume 29.
Recommended Citation
Glennan, Stuart, "When is it Mental?" Humana Mente / (2015): 141-166.
Available at https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/808