INDIVIDUATION AND CAUSATION IN PSYCHOLOGY

Over the last decade I have argued that certain relations between an individual and his environment are partly determinative of what it is for the individual to have certain kinds of mental states and events. In any full explication of the nature of such mental states, such relations will be cited. 1 call this view “anti-individualism”. 1 have grounded this view on a series of thought experiments. I will provide a crude sketch of one of them. One imagines someone A with a general familiarity with aluminum but without an ability to provide an account of the nature of aluminum that would distinguish it from every other actual or possible metal. A is aware that he is unable to do this, and allows that there might be other metals that would not be aluminum, but which he would be at a loss to distinguish practically or theoretically from aluminum. Nevertheless, A does often see, talk about, think about aluminum—as aluminum. He thinks that aluminum is a light metal, for example. A is like most of us. Next one imagines a counterfactual environment in which there is no aluminum and no colleagues of A who think or talk about aluminum. This environment contains in aluminum’s place one of those actual or possible metals that A could not distinguish from aluminum. Call this metal “twalum”. The environment also contains either A or a counter­ part of A that is for our purposes physiologically identical with A, throughout his history. Call this individual “B ”. (Insofar as there are minor gravitational differences between aluminum and the other metal, I assume that they need not affect B's physiology in any way that is relevant to accounting for his mental states.) In such a case, B clearly does not have any thoughts about aluminum. He does not, for example, think that aluminum is a light metal. He