Physicalism and the Part-Whole Relation

Erkenntnis, 2006

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.

2018

This paper aims at exposing a strategy to organize the debate around physicalism. Our starting point (following Stoljar 2010) is the pre-philosophical notion of physicalism, which is typically formulated in the form of slogans. Indeed, philosophers debating metaphysics have paradigmatically introduced the subject with aid of slogans such as "there is nothing over and above the physical", "once every physical aspect of the world is settled, every other aspect will follow", "physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical". These ideas are very intuitive but they are, of course, far from being a satisfactory metaphysical conception of Physicalism. For that end, we will begin with the definition of physicalism as the thesis that everything is physical, following Stoljar, we should be able to respond to one central question: how to interpret the physicalist claim that everything in physical.

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.

Physical Systems, 2012

Topoi, 2016

Synthese, 1995

Two ways are considered of formulating a version of retentive physicalism, the view that in some important sense everything is physical, even though there do exist properties, e.g. higher-level scientific ones, which cannot be type-identified with physical properties. Tile first way makes use of disjunction, but is rejected on the grounds that the results yield claims that are either false or insufficiently materialist. The second way, realisation physicalism, appeals to the correlative notions of a functional property and its realisation, and states, roughly, that any actual property whatsoever is either itself a physical property or else is, ultimately, realised by instances of physical properties. Realisation physicalism is distinctive since it makes no claims of identity whatsoever, and involves no appeal to the dubious concept of supervenience. After an attempt to formulate reatisation physicalism more precisely, I explore a way in which, in principle, we could obtain evidence of its truth. My aim in this paper is to discuss two suggestions concerning how best to formulate a doctrine of retentive physicalism. Let me now elucidate this statement of intention, by explaining what doctrines of retentive physicalism are. If scientific knowledge is an edifice, then it seems to be a multi-story one: when one notices how many different branches of science there are, one is tempted to arrange the many sciences into a hierarchy of levels of scientific description and explanation. 1 Starting at the lowest level, one could very crudely characterise the hierarchy as follows: fundamental physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology (to include neurobiology), psychology, economics, ecology. If one has this hierarchical picture of the many sciences, and if in particular one is inclined to locate fundamental physics at the bottom of this hierarchy, then one will want to trade the metaphors of levels and hierarchy for a non-metaphysical and clear answer to the following question: in what sense, precisely, can it be claimed that fundamental physics is the basic science, the science at the deepest level, the ground-floor science that sustains and supports all the other sciences? Rival doctrines of retentive physicalism, I suggest, can illuminatingly be viewed as rival attempts to answer exactly this question, i.e. to explain the precise sense in which physics is the basic science. Their answer is that physics is the basic science because the ontology of physics-the entities and properties it postulates-is in some metaphysical sense basic or fundamental or most deep. In short, the many sciences are related in the way they are because the portions of reality they deal with are related in a certain way. Doctrines of retentive physicalism, therefore, are largescale metaphysical views about the nature of the reality described by the many sciences and, in particular, about the privileged place occupied by

2009