AGENCY AND CAUSALITY

In Chapter 1, I stuck out my neck and sided with Aristotle, cognitive psychology, and common sense in according an important causal role to the intentional attitudes. What we do depends in part on what we think, and the dependence in question is straightforwardly causal. Now I shall try to make clear what is and what is not involved in a commitment to this causal perspective. The what is not is as important as the what is. There is a tendency, in thinking about mental causation, to set inappropriate standards for causality, then to conclude on the basis of appeals to these standards either that mental causation is impossible, or that the causation in question is attenuated or in some other respect second-class. Part of what I hope to do here is to provide a credible picture of one important facet of causal explanation and to show that mental causation accords with this picture.

I begin with a pair of caveats. First, a reminder: I shall not offer an argument against eliminativism (see Chapter 1, § 3). In part this is because it is not altogether clear what I should be arguing against. Eliminativists sometimes seem to endorse strong claims: Current work in the neurosciences shows, or at least gives us ample reason to suppose, that there are no intentional states of mind.