Do MacDonald Solve The Problem Of Mental Causal?

The study of mental causal problem in contemporary materialist philosophy of mind has deepened and extended people’s understanding of mental causality.This paper,centering on MacDonald’s discussion of psychological causality,makes a more comprehensive combing and in-depth study of his materialist theory of psychological causality.While combing and exploring contemporary materialist mental causal theories and having analyzed almost all the findings in this field,it makes tentative answers to the problem.I think one can say without exaggeration that the nonreductive physicalist’s problem of mental causation has dominated the philosophy of mind for the past 30 or 40 years.Because several decades of discussion have not resolved this issue,many philosophers have recently turned their attention to the underlying metaphysics and ontology of the debate.Cynthia MacDonald and Graham MacDonald are no exception.In their recent article,"The Metaphysics of Mental Causation" they argue that the twin problems of mental causal efficacy and the causal relevance of mental properties can be resolved for the nonreductive physicalist by adopting a certain version of the property exemplification theory of events.Chapter One mainly talks about the origin and contemporary focus of mental causal study Genetically,people began to pay extensive attention to and study mental causal problem from the sharp conflict between Descartes’ substance dualism and interaction theory.Chapters Two have the discussion on the prerequisites closely related to mental causal problem,"metaphysical problems" of mental causality,that is,the problems of causal relationship and identical relationship itself.Only by understanding this question can we answer the question of whether psychological phenomena are causally related to behavior.From the point of view of the status of mind in nature,only the non-reductive materialism which insists that psychological attributes are different from physical attributes has the psychological causality problem,but other forms of materialism do not have this problem.Chapters Three focuses on psychological causality,especially on Davidson’s abnormal monism.Chapters Four discusses the contemporary materialist philosopher of mind MacDonald’s answer to the problem of psychological causality.Different philosophers adopt different countermeasure strategies due to their different theoretical bases of concern and dependence.So how do MacDonald and MacDonald employ the property exemplificationaccount of events to solve the problem of mental causation?To answer this we needfirst to remember that there are actually two problems here.The first is to account for the efficacy of mental events;the second is to provide an account of the causal relevance of mental properties.The solution to the first problem is to appeal to what MacDonald and MacDonald call "the co-instantiation thesis." The plausibility of the co-instantiation thesis is supported by the appeal to thedeterminable/determinate relation.For an object to exemplify the property of being red just is for it to exemplify the property of being coloured.Hence,there are clear cases where two properties share just one instance or exemplification.While their exploration of the metaphysics of events is intriguing and looks to be effective at resolving the first issue,I believe it fails to resolve the vexing problem of causal relevance.In fact,I will argue that the reason for this failure stems from the very metaphysics of events they have proposed as part of their solution.