Events causal efficacy

Davidson, I think, is led to this particular line of defense because of his views about causation. Davidson holds an extensionalist view of causation - i.e., that causation is a relation between non-abstract particular events. Thus he says, But it is also irrelevant to the causal efficacy of physical events that they can be described in the physical vocabulary. It is events that have the power to change things, not our various ways of describing them (Davidson 1993 12). Since it is events that are causes, then any properties that are relevant to what a particular event causes are causal properties. Davidson says, But properties are causally efficacious if they make a difference to what individual events cause, and supervenience ensures that mental properties do make a difference to what mental events cause (1993 15). So since mental properties supervene on physical properties, and physical properties make a difference to what an event causes, mental properties also make a causal difference. 

So if all cases of causation are backed by strict laws, do these striet laws always eapture the unique causally efficacious properties If the answer to this questions is no , then the anomalism of mental properties will not rule out the eausal effieaey of mental properties. If strict laws do not always capture an event s only eausal properties, and thereby do not rule out the causal potency of other properties not eited in these striet laws, then we eould still have causation in virtue of mental properties. We could have an event that is backed by a strict law, a law which could accurately describe the event in terms of physics. However, there could be another causal explanation, one that is perhaps a better causal explanation in certain contexts, which cites causally efficacious mental properties in its explanation. Mental properties could be the properties in virtue of which the event is caused, even though we could also accurately describe the event in... 

As simple and elegant as the above solution may seem, it is neither available to nor desirable for the nonreductive materialist. Although a Davidsonian anomalous monism can solve the problem of event causation, the nonreductivist still must give some account of property causation. Nonreductive materialists hold that mental properties are distinct from and irreducible to physical properties. So the nonreductivist cannot just reduce mental property M to physical property P and say that M causes P because it is really identical with or reducible to P. The nonreductivist needs to show how it is that both M and P, even though they are distinct properties, can be causally efficacious with respect to P. ... 

But recall that the exclusion principle is not restricted to simply mental properties. The principle holds that no event can have two distinct properties unrelated by reduction as causes, if one of the properties is a sufficient cause. But the ball sorter example is a clear case where we have two distinct causes, unrelated by reduction. The lower-level property is a sufficient cause, yet the higher-level property is clearly a causal property as well. If the revised exclusion principle were true, it would rule out not just the causal efficacy of mental properties, it would also force us to hold that the property of size cannot be causally efficacious with respect to the balls sorting. In fact, we would have to say that no distinct and irreducible higher-level supervenient property is ever causal, and that all real causation always happens at the lower level. This is an unpleasant result and not one that we should be willing to accept. Thus, we ought to reject the exclusion principle on these grounds. 

There is a second concern about the causal efficacy of functional states and events that is often raised in the literature, a concern first raised, I believe, by Kim. Here is Jackson s (1996) statement of it ... 

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