EXCLUDING THOROUGHLY: THEORIES OF CAUSATION AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE EXCLUSION PROBLEM By ANDREAS FALKE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2017 © 2017 Andreas Falke To my mother and in memory of my father ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Sometimes a dissertation is a manifestation of academic flourishing. People may contribute to such flourishing in different ways. They may directly affect the dissertation’s content, as my teachers, students, and peers have done; or they may be the backdrop against which the project has been possible in the first place, by fostering intellectual curiosity and by providing emotional support, as some family members and friends have done. While it is impossible to mention every person who has affected this dissertation in some way, I wish to thank at least those to whom I am most indebted. In the fall semester of 1999, I took my first Philosophy of Mind course with Matthias Vogel at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. It is hard to overestimate the impact that this course had on me. Since we carefully worked our way through Jaegwon Kim’s introduction Philosophy of Mind, I was exposed to most of the arguments, positions, and problems that I am still thinking about, including the exclusion problem. Furthermore, Matthias’ enthusiasm for the subject and his striving of clarity infected me and thus set the course of my further academic development. I wish to thank him for that. It was also through him that I got invited to Wolfgang Detel’s colloquium. Populated by inspiring philosophers who possessed much greater knowledge and skill than I did at the time, it forced me to adapt intellectually, much to my own benefit. Though I am indebted to all the participants of the colloquium, I owe thanks particularly to Wolfgang Detel and Alexander Becker. Later, in 2006, they would constitute the committee for my Magister thesis in which I developed a criticism of Stephen Yablo’s proposed solution to the exclusion problem. In the meantime, I became a teaching and research assistant for Wolfgang. Having him as a teacher as well as a philosophical role model provided me with a solid foundation upon which I am still building. Without a doubt, I am most deeply indebted to him 4 among all the excellent teachers I had in Frankfurt. I wish to thank him for the many things I owe him for. There is not much of a point to building a foundation unless one plans to build something on it. Since I was interested in an area and in a kind of philosophy that was and, I believe, still is best done in the United States, it seemed like a good idea to apply to graduate school there. I got an invitation from the philosophy department of the University of Florida and readily accepted. I wish to thank the department as a whole for giving me the chance to study with philosophers who grew up in the analytic tradition and who have been an integral part of it. Particularly the courses I took with John Biro, David Copp, Michael Jubien, Chuang Liu, Kirk Ludwig, and Gene Witmer broadened my philosophical horizon and closed a good number of gaps. More importantly, they deepened my understanding of the arguments, positions, and problems and allowed me to see connections between concepts that I previously had kept separate in my mind. It is largely due to what I have learned from them that this dissertation focuses not on a problem within a particular area of philosophy but on a problem located at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Since I think this makes the dissertation more interesting and more valuable, I wish to thank them. Chuang, Gene, and John were also members of my dissertation committee. For that, and for feedback along the way, I owe them as well as the external committee member, Jonathan Edelmann, thanks. Without a doubt, I am most deeply indebted to Gene for being the superb advisor that he was and consequently for being the person I interacted most with philosophically. Numerous thoughts and insights on the following pages are the result of the many fruitful discussions I had with him. He made me see that many of the arguments and positions I deemed clear during my Frankfurt years really are not clear after all. Thus, he forced me to clarify where clarification was much 5 needed, thereby drastically improving the precision of my thinking and the clarity of my writing. I wish to thank him for all of this and more. Regarding the backdrop, Andy Lücking has been most influential for my intellectual development. Had it not been for our nightlong discussions of Nietzsche and for our innocent marveling at Frege and Wittgenstein as teenagers, I likely would not have become an academic, let alone a philosopher. It is telling that the owner of our local bookstore still remembers us as the only two kids in town that ordered “weird books.” I consider myself fortunate that a few years later I found another friend, Markus Rohling, with whom I could continue that tradition of excessively long conversations. I hope he knows how much I miss those tranquil evenings at the observatory. Without Andy and Markus, I would not be who I am today. They deserve my gratitude more than anyone else. In Frankfurt, I became friends with Hana Gründler, Oliver Schütze, and Jan-Erik Strasser. Fiercely smart and highly analytical, they have pushed my intellectual boundaries ever since. Letting our minds freely roam conceptual pastures has been among the most pleasurable and deeply satisfying activities in my life. I cannot imagine a life without it, thanks to them. I am confident that Hana, too, considers the loss of our beloved “kitchen of absurdity” to be a true tragedy for the realm of ideas. In Gainesville, Ron Claypool and Aubrey Spivey have provided emotional support and social stability beyond what they may be aware of. I will miss our philosophizing and cracking jokes during lunch breaks, and I will miss our long bike rides on the Hawthorne Trail. I hope they know how grateful I am for those times together. I also wish to thank Ray D. Fennell for having made me more aware of the beauty of simplicity; Michael Cullinan for not losing patience when I kept nagging him with questions about English grammar and punctuation; Larry McKill for offering some culture when I was 6 starving for it; Roger Meyer for listening when I needed to blow off steam; Allison H. Roulston for going beyond words with me; Charles Stanley—a.k.a. Carlo Pittore—for showing me how to live a life of complete dedication; and William Neville for his encouragement and support when it was needed, for sharing his academic insights as a man of letters who has “been there, done that,” and for loving Jordi Savall as much as I do. These friends all have been a seemingly inexhaustible source of intellectual stimulation. That two of them are not able to witness the completion of my dissertation saddens me beyond words. Finally, thanks are due to my brother, Christoph Falke, and my parents, Herbert and Rita Falke, for supporting me in numerous ways ever since I decided to study philosophy. I am sorry that my father, too, is among those who are not able to see the result of their support. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................11 1.1 Motivating the Project ......................................................................................................11 1.2 Structuring the Project ......................................................................................................19 2 THE EXCLUSION PROBLEM .............................................................................................23 2.1 Two Challenges ................................................................................................................23 2.1.1 The Lack of a Terminological Convention ............................................................25 2.1.2 The Lack of a Canonical Version ...........................................................................32 2.2 Formulating the Exclusion Problem .................................................................................37 2.3 Generalizing the Exclusion Problem ................................................................................50 2.4 Chapter Conclusion ..........................................................................................................55 3 CAUSATION AND THE EXCLUSION PROBLEM ...........................................................57 3.1 A Qualification .................................................................................................................57 3.2 Causal Explanations ..........................................................................................................58 3.3 Theories of Causation .......................................................................................................62 3.3.1 Regularity Theories ................................................................................................64 3.3.2 Counterfactual Theories .........................................................................................72