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Mental properties and so their instantiations in substances, mental events, are ones to which one substance has a privileged access; physical properties and so physical events are ones to which everyone has equal access. No mental event is identical to or supervenes on a physical event. Mental events include pure mental events (among them conscious events). Pure mental events include beliefs, thoughts, intentions, desires, and sensations. We can have well justified beliefs about the mental lives of others. The chapter ends by analysing in detail the failings of one physicalist theory, that of Papineau.

This chapter contradicts the anti-predictionism theory, which states that as long as an action is determined, it can be predicted, and vice versa. It begins by distinguishing between determinism and predictability, and juxtaposing human behavior with physical events. It then describes four types of “possibility of prediction” namely, logical possibility, logical compossibility, physical possibility, and causal composibility in light of explaining how voluntary actions can be scientifically predicted. Finally, it discusses that the causal necessity of an action is what makes it susceptible to scientific prediction, granted that the action is determined.

OVER THE LAST FEW decades there has been much debate in the philosophy of science over the attractiveness—and potential costs—of supervenience. As philosophers well know, supervenience burst onto the scene as the “Davidson debate” in the philosophy of mind began to raise some provocative questions over whether it was desirable to think of mental events as in some way irreducible to physical events, while still being firmly rooted in material dependence. After some initial misunderstanding over the question of whether supervenience was committing us to a sort of ontological break between the mental and the physical, it was finally settled that the autonomy one was after need not be metaphysical; an epistemological break would do just fine. After this the merits of supervenience could be clearly considered, for it allowed one to have it “both ways” in the dispute over mental states: mental explanations could be epistemically autonomous from physical ones (and thus probably not reducible to them), even while one preserved the notion of the ontological dependence of the mental on the physical (thus avoiding any embarrassing entanglements in supernatural or other spiritually based accounts of causal influence). Davidson himself, of course, never really bought into the non-reductive materialist craze that he started, preferring to champion his own idiosyncratic view of anomalous monism, which allowed the mental to continue to exist as irreducible, even while he gave it no causal or explanatory work to do. Since then Jaegwon Kim—the person who has done most to shed light on Davidson’s view and demonstrate how the concept of supervenience could recast it as a more legitimate contender among the many proposals on the merits of non-reductive materialism—has appeared to repudiate his own earlier views about explanation and now wholeheartedly endorses a type of physicalist-based account that is even more conservative than Davidson’s. In his recent work, Kim has argued not only for the elimination of any mentally based causal descriptions (or laws) of human behavior, but also seems to call into question the very idea that in pursuing scientific explanation we need to pay much attention to secondary-level descriptions.