Formulating physicalism: Two suggestions

The subject of this thesis is physicalism, understood not as some particular doctrine pertaining narrowly to the philosophy of mind, but rather as a quite general metaphysical claim to the effect that everything is, or is fundamentally, physical. Thus physicalism explicates the thought that in some sense physics is the basic science. The aim of the thesis is to defend a particular brand of physicalism, which I call eliminative type physicalism. It claims, roughly, that every property is a physical property, a property mentioned in the laws of physics, and hence that any putative property not identifiable with a physical property must be eliminated from our ontology. Eliminative type physicalism is apt to face three objections, and so my thesis, like Caesar's Gaul, falls into three parts. In the first, I argue against the idea that there are tenable positions, both physicalist and non-physicalist, alternative to eliminative type physicalism. I argue that each of these positions token physicalism (Fodor, middle Putnam), supervenience physicalism (Lewis, Horgan) and and a non-physicalist view I call pluralism (Goodman, late Putnam) is defective. In the second part, responding to the objection that there is just no reason to be a physicalist, I develop a positive argument for eliminative type physicalism, an argument resting upon a strong version of the explanatory test for reality according to which only explanatorily indispensable properties can justifiably be said to exist. In the third and final part, I argue, against the charge that eliminative type physicalism cannot accommodate what I call phenomenal properties (qualia, raw feels etc.), that there is no good reason to deny, and one good reason to affirm, that phenomenal properties just are physical properties.

Philosophical Studies, 2006

Intuitively, physicalism is the thesis that there's nothing Ôover and above' the physical. Going beyond this intuitive formulation requires an account of what it is for a property, kind, relation, or object to be a physical one. Here I defend an unfamiliar implementation of the familiar strategy of defining physical properties, etc. as those posited by the complete and ideal physical theory. That implementation ties being a physical theory to being a theory with the hallmarks of scientific theories and then identifies physical theories among the scientific ones by their characteristic subject matter, roughly, the world's relatively fundamental elements. I then argue that, fully fleshed out, such an account is able to satisfy an array of constraints on any account of the physical, as well as avoid a number of prima facie objections, without imposing Wilson's No Fundamental Mentality Constraint.

PHILO: A Journal of Philosophy, 2013

Abstract: The most common definitions of the physical lead to a problem for physicalism. If the physical is the objects of physics, then unique objects of other sciences are not physical, and, if the causal closure of the physical is accepted, cannot cause changes in the physical. That means unique objects of chemistry, the Earth sciences, and biology cannot causally affect physical states. But physicalism’s most reliable claim, the nomological dependence of non-physical entities and properties on the physical, can be accepted by a naturalism that avoids such problems.

Nonreductive physicalism (NRP) is the metaphysical thesis that claims that all the entities of our world constitute an ontological and causal network that is fundamentally physical and, however, cannot be reduced to nor fully explained by the laws, properties, and concepts that the basic physical science can discover and articulate. My purpose in this paper is to analyze the proposal of NRP and to argue that this philosophical approach should be understood in terms of macrophysicalism, that is, emergentism. My claim is that this version of physicalism is a philosophical theory that allows us to understand the coherence and irreducibility of the different scientific approaches, from microphysics and chemistry to psychology and sociology, trying to explain the various levels of organization of our empirical world. In the first part I analyze the standard (that is, the functionalist) formulation of NRP, which claims that although the higher level facts metaphysically supervene on the facts of the lower levels, ultimately on the microphysical facts, they cannot be reduced to the latter because of their multiple realizability. I explain the kind of criticisms that in recent years this perspective has received about its capability to account for the causal irreducibility of the higher level properties, a problem which arises from the assumption of the metaphysical supervenience of the macro-properties on their microphysical realizers or conditions; an assumption that is plausibly an empirically false claim. Then, I introduce emergentism or macrophysicalism as a nonreductive physicalist proposal which claims that the higher level properties cannot be reduced to their lower level bases because although they are metaphysically dependent on the latter, are not determined by these. Finally, I explain the downward causal influence that on this view the higher level properties should have on the lower causal processes.

Erkenntnis, 2005

Any position that promises genuine progress on the mind-body problem deserves attention. Recently, Daniel Stoljar has identified a physicalist version of Russell's notion of neutral monism; he elegantly argues that with this type of physicalism it is possible to disambiguate on the notion of physicalism in such a way that the problem is resolved. The further issue then arises of whether we have reason to believe that this type of physicalism is in fact true. Ultimately, one needs to argue for this position by inference to the best explanation, and I show that this new type of physicalism does not hold promise of more explanatory prowess than its relevant rivals, and that, whether it is better than its rivals or not, it is doubtful whether it would furnish us with genuine explanations of the phenomenal at all.

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2017

I shall argue in this article that there are certain objectual and methodological boundaries imposed by the nature of physics that all formulations of physicalism based on physical theories should respect. Therefore, empirical physicalism – i.e., the sort of physicalism that is eager to accept all the entities included in some future, ideal and complete physical theory and all entities dependent on them (see Jeffrey Poland and Janice Dowell) – is already committed to the exclusion of certain sorts of entities from its ontological inventory and it is far less tolerant than one might expect. After having presented my argument, I shall describe four plausible boundaries to what can be studied by physics. The boundaries will contribute to constructing a new version of physicalism, i.e., physics physicalism, whose acceptance is entailed by the acceptance of empirical physicalism. Finally, I shall briefly deal with three objections against my strategy and I shall evaluate the consequences of the acceptance of my conclusions for both physicalists and non-physicalists.

Inquiry, 2019

This essay has three goals. The first is to introduce the notion of fundamentality and to argue that physicalism can usefully be conceived of as a thesis about fundamentality. The second is to argue (i) for the advantages of fundamentality physicalism over modal formulations and (ii) that fundamentality physicalism is what many who endorse modal formulations of physicalism had in mind all along. Third, I describe what I take to be the main obstacle for a fundamentality-oriented formulation of physicalism: 'the problem of abstracta', which asks how physical can accommodate phenomena such as mathematics and universals, and which modal formulations do not face. I canvas three solutions: the inapt for ground solution, the concrete restriction, and the contingency restriction.

The place of physics in the edifice of science Modern planetarium software (e.g. on your tablet computer) allows to virtually travel to a celestial body in outer space, circle a bit around it and then return back to Earth. As one travels around in space one meets big, very big chunks of matter subject to enormous physical forces. Back on Earth one may continue the travel by zooming in on incredibly small objects using eventually a scanning electron microscope. Whatever one sees on the way is matter subject to certain forces – all of that physical in character. One would not be able to see these things, safe by a miracle, unless they were physical; because seeing things is itself at bottom a physical process. It is, of course, an enormously complicated process. So complicated that it would be folly to try to describe it in basic physical terms. But we are confident that it can be done, that it must be doable in principle, if we had enough information storage and computing time and power – and enough interest in accomplishing the task. So, whatever objects we encounter in this world, they are objects in principle in the domain of physics. And whatever properties these objects may have, they are properties equivalent to a set of values for fundamentally physical variables. This special role of physics in modern natural science is, we take it, a deeply entrenched working hypothesis of all science. Of course, the special sciences, as well as the humanities, employ carefully attuned " macro-packages " so as to obtain explanations of the phenomena that charac

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2009

We provide a formulation of physicalism, and show that this is to be favoured over alternative formulations. Much of the literature on physicalism assumes without argument that there is a fundamental level to reality, and we show that a consideration of the levels problem and its implications for physicalism tells in favour of the form of physicalism proposed here. Its key elements are, first, that the empirical and substantive part of physicalism amounts to a prediction that physics will not posit new entities solely for the purpose of accounting for mental phenomena, nor new entities with essentially mental characteristics such as propositional attitudes or intentions; secondly, that physicalism can safely make do with no more than a weak global formulation of supervenience.