If the mental could be reduced to the physical, then reasons would be irrelevant to causal explanations, because the reduced level would explain everything without the need to refer to reasons. Therefore, if reasons are causes, the mental cannot be reduced to the physical (RR 164-5). The legitimacy of the scientific enterprise requires the causal efficacy of reasons, because "in an experiment scientists co-determine an empirical result which, but for their intentional causal agency, would not have occurred" (DPF 52). This constitutes an immanent critique of reductive materialism.
Now it may be objected that if the mental could be reduced to the physical, reasons could still be real and causally efficacious, because one part of physical reality would be causally efficacious on other parts. Bhaskar's view does require an additional component: it is not just the reality and causal efficacy of reasons that prevent their reduction to the physical, they must be in some sense partly autonomous of the physical, which is to say that they are emergent (see Emergence).
It is possible to explain physical phenomena prior to the emergence of mental phenomena without reference to beliefs and intentional activity, but once mental activity has emerged and causally interacted with the physical world, explanation of physical phenomena requires ineliminable reference to intentional activity. It is this difference in explaining pre- and post-emergent physical phenomena that establishes the causal efficacy of reasons in a non-reductive sense. What is said here about mental phenomena carries over to the wider social bases of actions.
Copyright © 1997 Louis Irwin
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