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Jaegwon Kim (1934–2019)

Kim built the argument every modern account of emergence and mental causation must answer. The causal exclusion argument runs on three commitments most philosophers of mind already held: the physical domain is causally closed (every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause); mental properties supervene on physical ones; and effects are not systematically caused twice over. From these, a dilemma: if a mental property causes anything, either its causal work is identical with that of its physical base — reduction — or the physical base does all the work and the mental property is idle — epiphenomenalism. The dominant middle position of the 1970s and 80s, non-reductive physicalism (mental properties real, irreducible, and efficacious, resting on a physical base), is squeezed out: on Kim’s argument it cannot say what mental causes do that their bases leave undone. Three decades of the mind-body literature are structured around attempts to escape the squeeze.

Life

Born 12 September 1934 in Daegu, in Japanese-occupied Korea. He began university at Seoul National University (1953–55), transferred to Dartmouth — graduating summa cum laude in philosophy, French, and mathematics (1958) — and took his PhD at Princeton (1962). He taught at Swarthmore, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and for two decades at Michigan before moving in 1987 to Brown, where he was William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy until retirement. President of the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division (1988–89), elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Died 27 November 2019.

The programme

Supervenience made rigorous. Kim did more than anyone to turn “the mental depends on the physical” from a slogan into a tool. Through the 1980s he distinguished and formalised the grades — weak, strong, global supervenience — and proved results about their relations. The irony he then pressed: supervenience is too weak to be physicalism. It states a pattern of covariation and stays silent on why it holds; a dependence relation that explains nothing cannot carry a metaphysics. The framework most non-reductive physicalists relied on was, by his analysis, a statement of the problem rather than a solution.

The exclusion argument. Developed across papers into Mind in a Physical World (1998) and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005). Its target was the settlement descending from Putnam’s multiple realizability and Davidson’s anomalous monism: mental properties as real, irreducible, higher-level properties with their own causal powers. Kim’s charge is that the settlement is unstable — given closure and supervenience, the putative higher-level cause is always pre-empted by its base. The argument generalises beyond the mental: any irreducible higher-level property — biological, social, emergent — faces the same exclusion, which is why the argument is the modern emergence debate’s hinge as much as the mind-body debate’s.

Functional reduction. Kim’s positive account of how higher-level properties earn their causal keep: functionalise the property (define it by its causal role), find the physical realiser of that role, and identify the property’s causal work with the realiser’s. Reduction on this model is domain-specific and realiser-relative — not the old dream of law-to-law derivation. His conclusion was deliberately unsettling to both sides: most of the mental reduces and is thereby saved as causal; what resists functionalisation — the qualitative residue of experience — may be causally idle. Hence the title’s concession: physicalism, or something near enough.

The critique of emergentism. Kim wrote directly on emergence, reading the British Emergentists as the honest ancestors of non-reductive physicalism and pressing both with the same fork. Downward causation — the emergent whole acting on its parts — is, on his analysis, exactly where emergentism collides with closure: either the downward influence is redundant with the micro-history, or closure fails. He took emergentism seriously enough to formalise it, which is why friends and foes of emergence alike cite him.

The live disputes. The replies form their own literature. Compatibilists (from the counterfactual side — following Loewer, Woodward’s interventionism) argue that higher-level causes and their bases do not compete: causation as difference-making licenses both. Overdetermination theorists deny that systematic double-causation is objectionable in the supervenience case. Interventionists argue the exclusion argument trades on a production notion of causation that science does not use. And the “proportionality” line (from Yablo) holds that the higher-level cause is often the better cause — proportional to its effect where the micro-base is not. Kim replied in kind through the 2000s; whether any escape succeeds is unsettled, and the argument continues to organise the field either way.

Where Kim stops

The exclusion argument is stated within the layered picture it disciplines: distinct property-levels related by supervenience, with causal work to be apportioned among them. Frameworks that decline the layering — process views, accounts on which “levels” are descriptions rather than strata — sit outside the apparatus the argument runs on; whether that is a boundary or an escape is itself argued, with Jessica Wilson pressing the sharpest version: the layered picture the argument needs is optional, not obligatory. And his own settlement leaves its residue standing: the qualitative character of experience, which resists functionalisation, is left real but causally suspect — a concession he made explicitly rather than a gap his critics found. What to do with that residue is the question he handed on.

Key works

See also: Putnam · Fodor · Broad · Bedau · Dennett · Anderson