Objects causal relevance

It is important to understand that these are questions about the causal relevance of an object s properties (its being worth 20), not the causal efficacy of the objects (the 20 bills) that have these properties. These are, in other words, questions about what explains the result, not what causes it. Giving the cashier an object with a monetary value of 20 caused ict to... 

This chapter has asked whether the anomalism of mental properties rules out causation in virtue of these mental properties. Although this chapter has focused upon Davidson s view in particular, this problem is relevant to all nonreductive materialist views, since all nonreductive materialist views hold that mental properties are anomalous. If all cases of causation are backed by strict causal laws, then it might seem that mental properties can never be causal, since anomalous mental properties will never be part of these strict laws. I have argued however that even if all causation is backed by strict laws, mental properties can still be causal, since strict laws do not rule out causation in virtue of higher-level properties that are not part of those laws. I have raised two possible objections to this last claim, which are discussed in great detail in the next three chapters. Let us now turn to the first of these objections - Jaegwon Kim s exclusion argument. 

The literature on the pragmatics as well as the theoretical relevance of interventions in the philosophy of science focused on causal and mechanistic contexts, where it is taken for granted that the benefits of interventions stem from the (theoretically and pragmatically relevant) fact that when intervening on an object (or a variable in a representation of a causal system), we thereby change objects (or values of variables) that causally or mechanistically depend upon the object we intervened upon. ... 

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