According to Jaegwon Kim,non-reductive physicalism is problematic in terms of mental causation.One of the cruxes of mental causation lies in the non-overdetermination thesis,that is,the overdetermination is unacceptable.However,not all overde-termination cases are unacceptable,but systematic overdetermination cases are unacceptable because they violate the parsimony principle.On the contrary,cases of non-systematic,accidental overdetermination,which are extremely rare in nature,can be ac-cepted.The power of Jaegwon Kim's exclusion argument lies in its use of the concept of supervenience and its characterization of mental-physical relations based on the concept of supervenience physicalism,which would violate both of those two principles.This is because the concept of supervenience only describes the dependence between the mental and the physical,but does not ex-plain why this dependency exists.In contrast,the concept of metaphysical grounding has an explanatory function,which can ex-plain the metaphysical dependence between the mental and the physical.The explanatory function of the grounding concept inherits the mereological principle commonly used by the scientists,which can bridge the relations between different levels of properties,such as physical and chemical,chemical and biological,etc.Understanding the mental-physical relations based on metaphysical grounding can also fill the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical,and we can not only know that there is a depend-ence between mental and physical properties,but also that this dependence can be understood.This paper attempts to provide a new perspective for understanding mental causality.
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