Karen Bennett Mental Causation Analysis
In “Mental Causation,” Karen Bennett discusses the overdetermination argument associated with the exclusion problem. Even if one assumes that causal power can be attributed to the mental, it is unclear that mental causation contributes anything meaningful to the explanation of an effect and does not merely overdetermine it, since the effect could be given a purely physical explanation (Kim 325). Some philosophers have bitten the bullet and claimed that mental causation is, in fact, comparable to the classic overdetermination example of a firing squad shooting a victim. Just as the death of the victim was overdetermined given the multiple bullets (each being a sufficient cause), bodily motions are determined to occur by a physical and a mental