A Structure for Mental Causation

This paper suggests a structure that makes room for a class of solutions to the mental causation problem. 1 The mental causation problem The core of the mental causation problem, as I see it, is that there is more than one candi-date for what makes the effect of a mental event happen. One of those candidates seems to have the best possible credentials for making the effect happen. The rest have less good credentials. The best candidate wins; hence only it makes the effect happen. And, finally, the best candidate is not mental. What makes your actions happen isn’t your thoughts; rather it’s your physical makeup. (I take it that calling this the “mental ” causation problem is a bit of a misnomer, since the same problem comes up for anything outside of physics.) What I’m going to do here is suggest a structure for getting out of the problem. I’ll spend some time at the end discussing some problems for solutions based on the structure.