Functional properties exclusion argument

This type of objection to nonreductive materialism is central to the work of Jaegwon Kim. Kim discusses this objection extensively in the various versions of his exclusion argument or supervenience argument. He holds that the only way to give mental properties a causal role is to functionally reduce them to physical properties, since physical causation will always rule out causation in virtue of irreducible mental... 

The two big issues that are central in deciding who wins this debate are exclusion and context dependence. Anyone who buys the exclusion argument will have to reject nonreductive materialism. Anyone who believes that mental properties and other higher-level properties are context dependent will have to reject functional reduction. 

So, to sum up (i) functional reduction is not economical reduction functional properties cannot be reduced to realizer properties even in the most favorable, single-realizer scenarios. (2) Microbased properties cannot be economically reduced to (any of) their supervenience base properties. (3) The exclusion argument can be reformulated in terms of a notion of supervenience that permits properties of wholes to supervene on properties of parts, and this puts higher-level, microbased properties into competition with their lower-level constituent properties. Finally, (4) the incoherence and conventionality objections can be mounted against any and all properties that have not been economically reduced. 

This last point is, as I ve been suggesting, the most important one. If it s true, as 1 believe I ve demonstrated, that the exclusion argument generalizes to cover all nonbasic properties, functional and second-order or otherwise, then we simply have a reductio of the exclusion argument. But the incoherence and conventionality problems are independent of the fate of the exclusion argument, and they are serious. 

Kim argues that a predicate that is multiply realizable (e.g., a typical functional predicate) does not refer to a genuine property but is reducible instance by instance to whatever physical property realizes it in that particular instance. As we will see, this account of reduction is pardy motivated by the exclusion argument. 

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