Mental causality within Justus Buchler’s ordinal metaphysics

Abstract

The paper aims to look at the possibilities of overcoming the restriction on the systematic overdetermination of mental causation in the ordinal naturalism of J. Buchler. We think that in ordinal naturalism, conscious behavioral acts have integrity and specificity, while being associated with other orders (physiological, psychological, social), but not being reduced to them, which ensures the complexity of mental causation, i.e. the possession of both mental and physical traits of both cause-events and effect-events. This will allow us to change the form of causal statements so as to avoid overdetermination. Mental causation is interpreted as an irreducibly natural complex. The order of physical events excludes mental traits as irrelevant. In the order of events of conscious behavior, a coalescence of physical and mental complexes occurs, forming a new integral complex. Therefore, highlighting the mental aspect of causation is a description of the traits of both the cause-event and the effect-event, belonging to the same order of conscious behavior. The identification of individual traits may have the syntactic character of the analysis of causal statements, but ontologically both types of causality are real relations of natural complexes of different orders.