Causal profile of property

As mentioned earlier, different sorts of things are characterized by the different sorts of properties they are capable of having. And this is intimately related to the fact that different sorts of things are characterized by different persistence conditions. Owing to the points just made about the causal profiles of properties, the nature of some properties will be internally related to persistence conditions that define sorts of objects. As we might put it, they imply sortal properties, where having a sortal property involves having certain persistence conditions. I call these thick properties to... 

Putting aside for now the question of what makes a microphysical state of affairs a realizer of the instantiation of some property or other, let us turn to the question of what makes a microphysical state of affairs a realizer of an instance of some particular property, one on whose identity we have some sort of handle. 1 think there is no hope for an answer to this question that does not appeal to the idea that properties are individuated by causal profiles.7 The causal profile of a property is constituted by facts about what instances of that property can cause, or contribute to causing (these are forward-looking causal features of the property), and what such instances can be caused by ( backward-looking causal features of it). If we can also assign causal profiles to microphysical states of affairs, or rather to types of microphysical states of affairs, this should provide a way of saying when a microphysical state of affairs is a realizer of an instance of a particular property. It will be such a realizer if it is of a type of microphysical states of affairs having a causal profile that corresponds in an appropriate way to the causal profile of the property. To fill out the account, we need to say what... 

Although I hold that the causal profile of a property is essential to it, I do not assume anything this strong here. I assume only that in worlds nomologjcally like this one, each property has a distinctive causal profile and properties having the same causal profile are identical. 

It is not immediately obvious how to apply this to the case of an instance of pain and an instance of C-fiber stimulation, where pain is property-realized by C-fiber stimulation. The states of affairs that make up the core of the realizer of the pain instance should include ones that contribute directly to implementing the causal profile of pain but should not include, for example, ones that contribute to the activation of an accurate C-fiber stimulation detector. But of course the case at hand is one in which it is through the instantiation of C-fiber stimulation that the causal profile... 

An advantage of this account is that it holds instances of mental properties to be physically realized in a way that allows them to be causally efficacious, and it removes the threat that their causal efficacy is preempted by the instantiation of their physical property realizers. In the case where pain is property-realized by C-fiber stimulation, it is not true to say that the causal work we would like to ascribe to the pain instance is really done insteadhy the C-fiber-stimulation instance. Nor is it true, as it is on Kim s instance-identity thesis, that, although this work is done by the pain instance, this is only because it is identical with the C-fiber-stimulation instance. The work is indeed done by the C-fiber-stimulation instance, but this is because the core of the C-fiber-stimulation instance realizer has the core of the pain instance realizer as a part. It is only because the C-fiber-stimulation instance realizer contains the pain instance realizer that it has the relevant effects. Recall that the core of a property instance realizer consists of the states of affairs that contribute directly to the implementation of the causal profile of the property. The core of the C-fiber-stimulation instance realizer contains states of affairs that contribute to the implementation of the causal profile of pain, but these make this contribution only because they realize states of affairs contained in the state of affairs that is the core of the pain instance realizer. 

I have modified the formulation in Pfi sicalRealization to allow microphysicaJ realizers of instances of property realizers of a property to count as microphysical realizers of instances of that property -for example, to allow a microphysical realizer of C-fiber stimulation to count as a microphysical realizer of pain. This is required by things I say later. I speak of the state-of-afFair causal profiles as isomorphic with the property causal profiles, rather than identical with them, because slightly different sorts of causal features are involved in the two cases - in the one case features of states of affairs, in the other features of properties. 

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