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Jaegwon Kim
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Resumo
In a series of influential papers, Jaegwon Kim has argued forthree substantive theses on the metaphysics of explanation, each ofthem having other prestigious s defenders as well as independent intuitive appeal. They are: Explanatory Realism (ER): explanations are grounded in "world-cementing” objective relations between the events referred to by the explanandum and the explanans; Explanatory Pluralism (EP): there are in addition to causal explanations, explanations tied to non-causal dependence relations; Explanatory Exclusion (EE): there cannot be more than one complete and independent explanation of the same event. But the following puzzle arises: (ER) couples explanations with structural objective relations, and causes are one kind among such relations. Now, most of us think that every event has a cause. Thus, there is one explanation for each and every event: the causal explanation which "tracks" the cause of the event under consideration. Given such a causal explanation, (EE) rules out any other explanation of an event, and this for all events there are. Hence, (EP) cannot be true. I suggest a way out of the puzzle that eschews one of the theses but preserves the intuitions behind it.
Referências
Crane, T. (1995). Mental Causation, Proceedings of Aristotelian Society sup. vol. 69.
Cummins, R. (1983). The Nature of Psychological Explanation, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.
Heil, J. & Mele, A. (eds.) (1993). Mental Causation (New York, Oxford University Press).
Jackson, F. & Pettit, P. (1990). Program Explanations: A General Perspective, Analysis, vol. 50.
Kim, J. (1974). Noncausal Connections, Noûs, vol. 8. (Page references to the reprinted version in Kim, J. (1993a)).
Kim, J. (1984). Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 9.
Kim, J. (1988). Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism and Explanatory Exclusion, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 12.
Kim, J. (1989). Mechanism, Purpose and Explanatory Exclusion, Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 3. (Page references to the reprinted version in Kim (1993a)).
Kim, J. (1990). Explanatory Exclusion and the Problem of Mental Causation, in Villanueva, E. (ed.), Information, Semantics and Epistemology, (Oxford, Blackwell).
Kim, J. (1993a). Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Kim, J. (1993b). The Non-reductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation, in J. Heil & A. Mele (eds.) (1993).
Kim, J. (1994). Explanatory Knowledge and Metaphysical Dependence, Philosophical Issues, vol. 5.
Lewis, D. (1986). Causal Explanation, in Philophical Papers, vol. II, (New York, Oxford University Press).
Malcolm, N. (1968). The Conceivability of Mechanism, Philosophical Review, vol. 77. (Page references to the reprinted version in Watson, G. (ed.), Free Will, (Oxford, Oxford University Press)).
Ruben, D.H. (1990). Explaining Explanation. (London, Routledge.)
Sabatés, M. H. (s.d) Should a Cognitive Psychologist Worry About the Causal Inefficacy of the Mental?, in Niggemeyer, B. (ed.), The Cognitive Level: Language and Mind Modelized, (Duisburg LAUD Verlag).
Salmon, W. (1984). Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, (Princeton, Princeton University Press).
Yablo, S. (1992). Mental Causation, Philosophical Review, vol. 101
Este trabalho está licenciado sob uma licença Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 1996 Manuscrito: Revista Internacional de Filosofia
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