Kim, Jaegwon (1934–)

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KIM, JAEGWON
(1934–)

Jaegwon Kim is a Korean American philosopher born in Taegu (Korea) and educated at Seoul National University, Dartmouth College, and Princeton University. He has taught at Cornell University, University of Michigan, and Brown University, among other institutions. Kim's decisive contributions to philosophy range mainly over many central topics in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics but extend to philosophy of science and epistemology as well. Kim's most influential views in metaphysics and his early stance about the mind were defended in essays published from the early 1970s to the early 1990s and collected in the book Supervenience and Mind (1993). His later views on the mind are defended in two books: Mind in a Physical World (1998) and Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005).

In metaphysics, Kim's most crucial influence has been in event theory and the nature of dependence relations, including causation and supervenience. Kim's property exemplification account of events is regarded, together with Donald Davidson's account, as one of the two main contenders in the field. According to Kim (1993, essays 1 and 3) an event is not a basic component of ontology; it is a complex entity constituted by a property P (or a relation) exemplified by an object O (or n-tuple of objects) at a time t. If events are the relata of causal relations and causal relations require nomological connections (two widespread assumptions that Kim supports), Kim's fine-grained account of events has the advantage of indicating, in a causal relation, which feature of the cause event (its constitutive property) is nomologically connected with which feature of the effect event (its constitutive property).

Kim argues that just as causation (about which he is a regularist and a realist) constitutes the diachronic connection among phenomena, there are other metaphysically significant cementing relations that are noncausal (1993, essay 2). One of those relations is particularly important: supervenience, a synchronic dependence relation that connects properties in a given supervenient level with properties of a more basic level so that the most basic ones fully determine the supervenient ones. Kim is widely regarded as the leading theorist on supervenience, having carefully distinguished between several types of supervenience relations (e.g., weak, strong, and global) their consequences for reduction and for naturalist ontologies, having applied the notion to a general ontological stance he calls the layered view of reality and having used the concept to analyze perennial issues in the mind-body problem (1993, essays 4 to 10).

In the philosophy of mind Kim's work can be divided in three phases. In the early 1980s he defended a nonreductive naturalist/physicalist model of mental causation called supervenient causation. Given two mental properties M and M* that supervene, respectively, upon physical properties P and P*, if P causes P*, M superveniently causes M*. And if M supervenes on P and P causes P*, M superveniently causes P*. Supervenient causation is not outright causation but Kim claimed it was sufficient to endow mental properties with causal efficacy since these properties supervene on properties involved directly in causal processes. Supervenience plays here the double role of articulating the naturalist commitment and accounting for an acceptable (yet somewhat deflationary) approach to mental causation. The model is nonreductive because despite the causal powers of mental properties being reduced to those of their bases, the properties themselves are not reduced since supervenience does not imply identity.

In the late 1980s Kim produced several famous attacks against different forms of nonreductive physicalism (1993, essays 13 to 17; 1998, chapters 2 and 3). Against Davidson's anomalism, Kim argues that the view implies that the fact that an event falls under a mental kind is a causally irrelevant fact. Against functionalism, he claims that its multiple realizability thesis implies local reductions and as such does not have the intended nonreductive force. More generally, he develops an argument against all forms of nonreductive physicalism called the causal/explanatory exclusion argument. For a physicalist every physical event has to have a complete physical cause. Kim shows by analyzing and ruling out scenarios that go from partial causes to causal overdetermination that within that framework, we cannot attribute a causal role to the mental unless it is identified with the physical, turning nonreducible mental properties into epiphenomena. Since he also defends the principle that without causal efficacy an entity cannot be real, every form of nonreductive physicalism turns into an eliminativist view. It soon became evident to Kim as much as to his critics that his supervenient causation model is also an easy target of the exclusion argument. Additionally, Kim has lost faith on the explanatory power of the supervenience relation in general, and in particular as a tool for analyzing mental causation. If supervenience is only a superficial relation of property covariation between the mental and the physical and it is itself in need of explanation, it cannot articulate a deep explanatory relation between the mental and the physical.

With this background Kim developed in the 1990s an approach to the mental that can be called functional reductionism (1998, 2005). The proposal consists of grounding the mind-body supervenience relation on the realization relation proposed by functionalism. Mental properties are second-order properties defined over a set of first-order properties that satisfy a given causal/functional condition and thus are eligible as realizers of such second-order properties. Given a mental property M we attempt to construct a functionalization of it in which M is characterized in terms of its typical causes and effects. This functionalization of a property is, Kim argues, sufficient for reduction (under a non-Nagelian, functional account of reduction). Reductive functionalization explains why there are the dependence relations there are and provides ontological simplification by identifying the second-order property with an exhaustive disjunction of all its realizers or else, according to Kim, we may decide to recognize only second-order concepts or predicates but not second-order properties. Still, Kim thinks that the qualitative properties of experience, unlike the rest of mental states, cannot be functionalized. Since, according to Kim, they are not reducible through type identification with neural-biological properties either, we have to accept them as a mental residue that prevents us from embracing a fully generalized physicalism.

Within philosophy of science, Kim's most significant contribution is a sophisticated view of what he calls the metaphysics of explanation that combines explanatory realism and pluralism (1989, 1994). According to realism, explanations are grounded in structural, world-cementing objective relations between the events referred to by the explanandum and the explanans. According to pluralism there are, in addition to causal explanations, explanations tied to noncausal, structural dependence relations (such as supervenience). This view can be seen to accord well with Kim's views regarding causal realism and the importance of noncausal relations, and explicitly includes the claim that pluralist realism explains via unification the cognitive value of explanations. In epistemology, Kim has produced an influential critique of Willard Van Orman Quine's naturalized epistemology (1993, essay 12). While defending epistemological naturalism in the sense that epistemic properties supervene upon factual, nonepistemic properties, he criticizes Quine's purely nomological, nonnormative approach to studying how evidence relates to beliefs. The gist of Kim's argument is that the very concept of knowledge disappears if we abandon the normative notion of justification.