Mental Causation Karen Bennett* Princeton University Abstract Concerns about ‘mental causation’ are concerns about how it is possible for mental states to cause anything to happen. How does what we believe, want, see, feel, hope, or dread manage to cause us to act? Certain positions on the mind-body problem – including some forms of physicalism – make such causation look highly problematic. This entry sketches several of the main reasons to worry, and raises some questions for further investigation. 1. Introduction You are sitting at your computer, reading an online philosophy article. You become aware that you are thirsty, and would like something cold to drink. You go to the kitchen and get yourself a glass of ice water. That is – you want some water, you believe you can get some in the kitchen, and that belief and desire together cause your arms and legs to move in various complicated ways. Questions about mental causation are questions about how this is possible. How is it that our beliefs, desires, and other mental states manage to guide our action? Does what we think, want, feel, and perceive really cause our bodies to move? Most people take it as a datum that the answer is ‘yes’. Jerry Fodor puts the point in his characteristically gripping way: if it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying . . . If none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world. (‘Making Mind Matter More’ 156) So if a view about the nature of mind does not allow for mental causation, that is a very large strike against it. It is not surprising, then, that some version of this charge has been levied at a large number of views: substance dualism, property dualism, and nonreductive physicalism of various forms, including in particular functionalism and anomalous monism. ‘Some version of this charge’, indeed. By my count, there are at least seven problems of mental causation, each depending upon different assumptions, and causing trouble for different views: © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Philosophy Compass 2/2 (2007): 316–337, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00063.x