Tuomas K. Pernu (2015), Erkenntnis 81(5), 1031–1049 (2016) — DOI-10.1007/s10670-015-9781-7
Key takeaways
- The counterfactual theory of causation can answer the causal exclusion problem without being committed to downward causation, provided the semantics of counterfactuals is handled carefully. The exclusion problem itself, however, comes in several distinct forms.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
A leading response to Kim’s causal exclusion problem appeals to a counterfactual account of causation. Critics have argued that this account cannot solve the problem because it commits one to downward causation. Pernu analyses those arguments and gives an account of counterfactual dependence. He argues that, with careful attention to counterfactual semantics, the counterfactual notion of causation need not be committed to downward causation. He also argues that the exclusion problem takes more than one form.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 0 seconds of active reading over 0 sessions. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — never opened (t=0), no full text reachable, and only loosely connected to the batch’s quantum and structural-realism cluster.
What a deeper reading should check:
- It bears on mental causation and on non-reductive physicalism. It pairs naturally with Poltorak (LIT-164) on causal closure, which is the other premise of the exclusion argument.
- A deeper reading should identify which critics are targeted (presumably those arguing that counterfactual accounts entail downward causation), what the “careful semantics” amounts to (closest-world selection with supervenience held fixed?), and how the distinct forms of the exclusion problem are drawn.
- Philosophy of mind has no topic of its own in the vocabulary (
consciousness,agencyandcognitionall miss “mental causation”). If the record files more of this strand, it may want one.
Access when seeded: Springer blocked curl with a bot challenge, and the PDF link did the same. A WebFetch after following Springer’s cookie redirect returned a model-written summary of the landing page, which gave the date (27 October 2015), volume/pages and part of the abstract; that is not a skim. Crossref confirms the online date and 81(5) 1031–1049. Unpaywall lists no open copy, and the author’s site (tuomaspernu.london) links only to Springer. No full text was reached. The abstract is known from the batch capture (truncated) plus the WebFetch summary, whose final sentence I could not see verbatim. The keywords shown on Springer (“Actual World”, “Mental Property”, …) look machine-generated, so the keywords above are my own.