Causation, Mechanism and Mind

Philosophers of mind and cognitive science have recently gravitated towards a new mechanistic approach to constitutive explanation, and an interventionist approach to causation and causal explanation. In this dissertation I discuss the implications of these new approaches for four issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science: Mental causation, the nature of explanation, the extended mind hypothesis, and the dynamicist approach to explanations in cognitive science. I argue that the interventionist account of causation can be used to solve the problem of causal exclusion for non-reductive physicalist approaches to mental causation. However, in order to do so I propose a new improved version of interventionism which rules out the possibility of a certain kind of overdetermination, thereby showing that at most only one of the two different interventionist solutions to the exclusion problem is indeed a viable solution on behalf of non-reductive physicalism- namely, the interventionist proportionality argument. Next, I argue that the ontic and epistemic construals of mechanistic explanations should be seen as reflecting different (though related) legitimate senses of explanation, and there is no reason to think that the different senses of explanation are in conflict with one another. Next, I provide a novel argument against the extended mind hypothesis, employing only premises that proponents of the extended mind hypothesis (including the New Mechanists) have independent reasons to accept. I conclude that while the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance- embraced by the New Mechanists- may be useful for demarcating the boundaries of mechanisms studied in many of the sciences, it cannot be used to support the extended mind hypothesis. Finally, I show that two arguments commonly made in the debate between Dynamicists and the New Mechanists are mistaken, and I conclude that there is- or need be- far less theoretical disagreement between Dynamicists and the New Mechanists than is suggested by the debate.