ABSTRACT
It is shown that four of E. J. Lowe’s arguments for property dualism, which are based on his analysis of mental causation, establish weak but not strong property dualism. According to the former, which is compatible with physicalism, the property of an event to be a decision differs from its neural property of being constituted by a specific pattern of neural activity. According to the latter, which is incompatible with physicalism, mental properties are, in addition, irreducible to neural properties. The representation of causal relations in the framework of structural equations provides the means to clarify how mental properties differ from neural properties: A precise meaning can be given to the claim that mental causes are specific for bodily movements constitutive of actions, whereas neural causes are not. This framework also provides the means to interpret Lowe’s thesis that decisions are uncaused, as saying that no cause of a decision is specific for it.
