INVESTIGADORES
BARBERIS Sergio Daniel
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Levels of explanation, mechanicism and the interface problem
Autor/es:
BARBERIS, SERGIO
Lugar:
Córdoba
Reunión:
Workshop; Workshop sobre Temas de la Filosofía de J. L. Bermúdez; 2012
Institución organizadora:
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Resumen:
To affirm that there are horizontal mixed explanations of behavior is to accept that there are interlevel causal explanations of personal phenomena: that is, explanations of personal events or states that incorporate items belonging to a lower level of composition (the subpersonal) as causal antecedents. However, if you accept the existence of horizontal mixed explanations, then you face a serious metaphysical puzzle. The problem is that if you elucidate the relations between personal and subpersonal items as compositional or part-whole relations then there exists a widely accepted assumption about the nature of causation that precludes the very possibility of interlevel causation (that is, the possibility of causal relations between parts and wholes). It is common ground about causation that causes and effects must be at least logically independent, but in the constitutive (compositional) relation, a token instance of the property A is, in part, constituted by an instance of the property B; as such, the tokening of B is not logically independent of the tokening of A (Craver 2007, 153). We are left with the following picture: there are: (a) causal explanations within the personal level, (b) causal explanations within the subpersonal level, and (c) vertical explanations that constitutively link personal-level phenomena and subpersonal-level components. This picture leaves no room for the autonomy of the personal: the vertical relations between the personal and the subpersonal are not expendable details but are essential and constitutive of what personal phenomena really are.