Journal article
Rejecting epiphobia
- Abstract:
- Epiphenomenalism denies some or all putative cases of mental causation. The view is widely taken to be absurd: if a theory can be shown to entail epiphenomenalism, many see that as a reductio of that theory. Opponents take epiphenomenalism to be absurd because they regard the view as undermining the evident agency we have in action and precluding substantial self-knowledge. In this paper, I defend epiphenomenalism against these objections, and thus against the negative dialectical role that the view plays in philosophy of mind. I argue that nearly in all cases where a theory implies one kind of epiphenomenalism, it is an epiphenomenalism of a non-problematic kind, at least as far as issues about agency and self-knowledge are concerned. There is indeed a problematic version of epiphenomenalism, but that version is not relevant to the debates where its apparent absurdity is invoked.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 263.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11229-020-02911-w
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Synthese More from this journal
- Volume:
- 199
- Pages:
- 2773-2791
- Publication date:
- 2020-10-21
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-10-10
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-0964
- ISSN:
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0039-7857
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1136506
- Local pid:
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pubs:1136506
- Deposit date:
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2020-10-08
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Umut Baysan
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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