Justin Tiehen
Assistant Professor of
Philosophy
Publications
“The Cost of Forfeiting Causal Inheritance,”
forthcoming
in Philosophical Studies.
I draw on
Jaegwon Kim’s causal inheritance principle to argue against Sydney Shoemaker’s
subset account of realization. In the process, I draw on a debate regarding the
extended mind hypothesis defended by Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
“The Role Functionalist Theory of Absences,”
forthcoming
in Erkenntnis.
Functionalist
theories have been proposed for just about everything: mental states,
dispositions, moral properties, truth, causation, and much else. In this work I
defend a role functionalist theory of nothing. Or, more accurately, a role
functionalist theory of those absences that are causes and effects.
“Psychophysical
Reductionism without Type Identities,” American Philosophical Quarterly,
49.3 (2012), 223-236.
If you’re
going to be a psychophysical reductionist, must you be a type identity
theorist? No. In this work I set out an alternative reductionist view, type
eliminativism, and argue for its superiority to the type identity theory.
“Disproportional Mental Causation,”
Synthese, 182 (2011),
375-391.
I argue
against the proportionality component of Stephen Yablo’s account of mental
causation and show that alternative nonreductive physicalist accounts of mental
causation that do not appeal to proportionality can avoid counterexamples that
Yablo’s account is susceptible to.
“Emergence
and Quantum Mechanics,” with Fred
Kronz, Philosophy of Science, 69.2
(2002), 324-347.
We develop
an account of dynamic emergence, according to which emergent wholes are
produced by an essential, ongoing interaction of their parts. We argue that
this account has application within quantum mechanics, and in particular that
it applies in cases involving nonseparable Hamiltonians.
Work in Progress
Distinguish
the general thesis of physicalism simpliciter from the more restricted thesis
of physicalism about the mental. Physicalism about the mental cannot be defined
in terms of psychophysical supervenience or any alternative relation that
entails such supervenience. Instead, it must be defined in terms of a form of
realization that is not supervenience-entailing.
Why is the
physical realm causal closed? What
explains causal closure? I argue that physicalists are committed to one
explanation of causal closure to the exclusion of others, and that as a result
no physicalist can maintain that dualism is causally problematic.
Dissertation
A brief
summary of my dissertation on mental causation.
Dissertation: Normativism
and Mental Causation
All 293 pages of it.