This paper intervenes in an argument over the number of thoughts that could be thought. The argument has important implications for supervenience physicalism, the thesis that all is physical or supervenient on the physical. If, per quantum mechanics, the number of possible physical states is finite while the number of possible thoughts is infinite, then the latter exceeds the former in number, and supervenience phyicalsim fails. Abelson first argued that possible thoughts are infinite as we can think of any of (...) the infinite natural numbers. Subsequently, physicist Max Tegmark argued that we cannot think of all the numbers there are, that some are simultaneously too large and too nondescript to reference. Porpora offered a brief proof countering Tegmark. Curtis then countered Porpora, arguing that Porpora’s argument runs afoul of the Berry paradox. This paper shows that while Curtis does offer an analogous proof that does fall prey to the Berry paradox, Porpora’s does not. The result reinstates Porpora’s argument with all its implications for supervenience physicalism and offers a clearer lesson from the Berry Paradox. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with two concepts of qualitativeness that apply to intensional entities. I propose an account of pure qualitativeness that largely follows the traditional understanding established by Carnap, and try to shed light on its ontological presuppositions. On this account, an intensional entity is purely qualitative iff it does not ‘involve’ any particular. An alternative notion of qualitativeness—which I propose to refer to as a concept of strict qualitativeness—has recently been introduced by Chad Carmichael. However, Carmichael’s definition presupposes (...) a highly fine-grained conception of properties and relations. To eliminate this presupposition, I tentatively suggest a different definition that rests on a concept of perspicuous denotation. In the penultimate section, both concepts of qualitativeness are put to work in distinguishing between different ‘grades’ of qualitative discriminability. (shrink)

Naturalism is normally taken to be an ideology, censuring non-naturalistic alternatives. But as many critics have pointed out, this ideological stance looks internally incoherent, since it is not obviously endorsed by naturalistic methods. Naturalists who have addressed this problem universally foreswear the normative component of naturalism by, in effect, giving up science’s exclusive claim to legitimacy. This option makes naturalism into an empty expression of personal preference that can carry no weight in the philosophical or political spheres. In response to (...) this dilemma, I argue that on a popular (but largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as a commitment to inference to the best explanation, methodological naturalism can be both normative and internally coherent. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the law related to identity theft, to review corresponding rights, and responsibilities of stakeholders involved in identity theft and to formulate a system of best practices businesses could engage in to prevent or reduce identity theft threats. Utilizing two ethical frameworks based on deontological approaches, the authors conclude that there should be a well-defined management scheme to prevent identity theft, which is easy to comprehend and comply with for all stakeholders. Our proposed (...) management scheme incorporates both legal and ethical elements such that identity theft will be more difficult. Further, our proposal would also address business entities’ practices that are so careless that identity theft is made possible at all or made easier: ethical business practice can do much to reduce or eliminate identity theft. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about whether there could be “zombies”: beings physically identical to normal human people but lacking consciousness. Establishing their possibility would refute physicalism. But it is seldom noted that the popular “constitution view” of human people implies that our bodies actually are zombies. This would contradict several widely held views in the philosophy of mind.

When one considers one's own persistence over time from the first-person perspective, it seems as if facts about one's persistence are "further facts," over and above facts about physical and psychological continuity. But the idea that facts about one's persistence are further facts is objectionable on independent theoretical grounds: it conflicts with physicalism and requires us to posit hidden facts about our persistence. This essay shows how to resolve this conflict using the idea that imagining from the first-person point of (...) view is a guide to centered possibility, a type of possibility analyzed in terms of centered worlds. (shrink)

This article discusses recent disagreements over the correct formulation of physicalism. Although there appears to be a consensus outside those who discuss the issue that physicalists believe that what exists is what is countenanced by physics, as we will see, this orthodoxy faces an important puzzle now frequently referred to as 'Hempel's Dilemma'. After surveying the historical trajectory from Enlightenment-era materialism to contemporary physicalism, I examine several mainstream approaches that respond to Hempel's dilemma, and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

A prominent objection to supervenience physicalism is that a definition of physicalism in terms of supervenience allows for physicalism to be compatible with nonphysicalist outlooks, such as certain forms of emergentism. I take as my starting point a recent defense of supervenience physicalism from this objection. According to this line of thought, the subvenient base for emergent properties cannot be said to be purely physical; rather, it is “polluted” with emergent features in virtue of necessarily giving rise to them. Thus, (...) if emergentism is true, it is false that everything supervenes on physical properties. I argue that this gives way to a new challenge for supervenience physicalism. The challenge, roughly, is to distinguish the emergentist’s “polluted” base from a physical supervenience base; that is, to give conditions under which the subvenient base is not “polluted” by supervenient properties. The problem, I argue, is that it is hard to see how this can be done without collapsing supervenience physicalism into alternative approaches to physicalism. I thus argue that if the present defense of supervenience physicalism succeeds in defending the adequacy of a supervenience-based definition of physicalism, it does so by compromising its uniqueness. (shrink)

This paper proposes a model for implementation of intrinsic natural language sentence meaning in a physical language understanding system, where 'intrinsic' is understood as 'independent of meaning ascription by system-external observers'. The proposal is that intrinsic meaning can be implemented as a point attractor in the state space of a nonlinear dynamical system with feedback which is generated by temporally sequenced inputs. It is motivated by John Searle's well known (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3: 417–57, 1980) critique of the then-standard (...) and currently still influential computational theory of mind (CTM), the essence of which was that CTM representations lack intrinsic meaning because that meaning is dependent on ascription by an observer_._ The proposed dynamical model comprises a collection of interacting artificial neural networks, and constitutes a radical simplification of the principle of compositional phrase structure which is at the heart of the current standard view of sentence semantics because it is computationally interpretable as a finite state machine. (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as (...) mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In earlier work, I proposed and defended a formulation of physicalism that was distinctive in appealing to a carefully-defined relation of physical realization. Various philosophers (Robert Francescotti, Daniel Stoljar, Carl Gillett, and Susan Schneider) have since presented challenges to this formulation. In the present paper, I aim to show that these challenges can be overcome.

The cognitive neurosciences are based on the idea that the level of neurons or neural networks constitutes a privileged level of analysis for the explanation of mental phenomena. This paper brings to mind several arguments to the effect that this presumption is ill-conceived and unwarranted in light of what is currently understood about the physical principles underlying mental achievements. It then scrutinizes the question why such conceptions are nevertheless currently prevailing in many areas of psychology. The paper argues that corresponding (...) conceptions are rooted in four different aspects of our common-sense conception of mental phenomena and their explanation, which are illegitimately transferred to scientific enquiry. These four aspects pertain to the notion of explanation, to conceptions about which mental phenomena are singled out for enquiry, to an inductivist epistemology, and, in the wake of behavioristic conceptions, to a bias favoring investigations of input–output relations at the expense of enquiries into internal principles. To the extent that the cognitive neurosciences methodologically adhere to these tacit assumptions, they are prone to turn into a largely a-theoretical and data - driven endeavor while at the same time enhancing the prospects for receiving widespread public appreciation of their empirical findings. (shrink)

The epistemological chasm between how we (implicitly and subjectively) perceive or imagine the actual world and how we (explicitly and “objectively”) think of its underlying entities has motivated perhaps the most disconcerting impasse in human thought: the explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical properties of the world. Here, I advocate a combination of philosophical skepticism and simplicity as an informed approach to arbitrate among theories of consciousness. I argue that the explanatory gap is rightly a gap in our understanding, (...) but one that is not surprising; and we being observers biased by our first-person perspective and our existence may both hinder and (the realization we have them) assist our reasoning. Further, I unfold the concept of observer into two distinct notions based on its functional and phenomenal aspects, and exploit this device to elucidate the subject-observer relationship. Then, I proceed to analyze the philosophical zombie dilemma. Lastly, I contend that from a skeptical viewpoint, panpsychism (or neutral monism) is the most parsimonious doctrine accounting for the explanatory gap, and suggest that it would be possible to make headway in the hard problem of consciousness by uncovering non-trivial causal relationships between qualia states and functional states, if routine and controlled manipulation of neural circuits were easily available. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...) what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

Argument-forms exist which are valid over finite but not infinite domains. Despite understanding of this by formal logicians, philosophers can be observed treating as valid arguments which are in fact invalid over infinite domains. In support of this claim I will first present an argument against the classical pragmatist theory of truth by Mark Johnston. Then, more ambitiously, I will suggest the fallacy lurks in certain arguments for physicalism taken for granted by many philosophers today.

This is a dialogue between an opponent of the phenomenal concept strategy and Mary from Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument. In this dialogue, Mary, who has complete physical knowledge about what it is like to see red, but has never seen red, is a physicalist and she defends the phenomenal concept strategy against her interlocutor’s objections. In the end, none of them is able to convince the other, but their conversation, through considerations of different versions of the knowledge argument and different (...) applications of the phenomenal concept strategy, reveals the most basic disagreement, or clash of intuitions, they have. The implied conclusion of the dialogue is that the disagreement on the success of phenomenal concept strategy as a physicalist response to the knowledge argument cannot be resolved unless this particular clash of intuitions is resolved. (shrink)

We assessed the impact of teaching methodological aspects of physics on students’ scientistic beliefs and subject interest in physics in a repeated-measurement design with a total of 142 students of upper secondary physics classes. Students gained knowledge of methodological aspects from the pre-test to the post-test and reported reduced scientistic beliefs, both from their own views and from their presumed prototypical physicists’ views. We found no direct impact of teaching on students’ subject interest in physics. As path analysis indicates, this (...) result can be traced back to opposing paths: Lower scientistic beliefs of students attenuate subject interest while lower presumed scientistic beliefs that they hold of physicists foster subject interest. This finding is in accordance with the self-to-prototype matching theory that predicts an impact of the overlap between students’ self-image and their prototypical image on subject interest in physics. (shrink)

One of the most characteristic cornerstones of Asay’s book, A Theory of Truthmaking, is the defense of what he calls the ontology-first perspective on what the truthmaker project is all about. He distinguishes it from and defends it over what he calls the explanation-first perspective, and he bases his overall theorizing about truthmaking on it. This critical notice aims to counter Asay’s challenges for the explanation-first perspective and reveal its theoretical advantages over its rival. First, I show how to escape (...) Asay’s presented dilemma for the explanation-first perspective by specifying the nature of the distinctive form of explanation that explanation-first truthmaker theorists should envisage. Second, partly based on my proposal in the preceding discussion, I provide an account of the cases that Asay thinks pose troubling questions concerning whether a certain entity really serves as the explanans of a truthmaking explanation. Third, I establish a way in which the explanation-first perspective can be beneficial to what the ontology-first perspective focuses on, namely, exploring the ontological requirements for truths. The overall discussion warns against the underestimation of the prospects for the explanation-first perspective. (shrink)

Recent discussions of physicalism have focused on the question how the physical ought to be characterized. Many have argued that any characterization of the physical should include the stipulation that the physical is non-mental, and others have claimed that a systematic substitution of ‘non-mental’ for ‘physical’ is all that is needed for philosophical purposes. I argue here that both claims are incorrect: substituting ‘non-mental’ for ‘physical’ in the causal argument for physicalism does not deliver the physicalist conclusion, and the specification (...) that the physical is non-mental is irrelevant to the task of formulating physicalism as a substantive, controversial thesis. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness has held center stage in the philosophy of mind for the past two decades. It claims that the phenomenal character of conscious experiences—what it’s like to be in them—cannot be explained by appeal to the operation of physiological subsystems. The hard problem arises, however, only given the assumption that hylomorphism is false. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. A human is not a random collection of physical materials, but an individual (...) composed of physical materials with a structure that accounts for what it is and what it can do—the powers it has. What is true of humans is true of their activities as well. The latter are not random physiological changes, but structured ones: we engage in them by coordinating the ways our parts manifest their powers. Structured activities include perceptual experiences. Consequently, everything about a perceptual experience, including its phenomenal character, can be explained by describing the perceiver’s perceptual subsystems, the powers of those subsystems, and the coordination that unifies their activities into the activity of the perceiver as a whole. Conscious experiences thus fit unproblematically into the natural world—just as unproblematically as the phenomenon of life. Even exponents of the hard problem of consciousness agree that there is no hard problem of life. Consequently, if hylomorphism is true, there can be no hard problem of consciousness. To insist that there is such a problem, then, is implicitly to reject hylomorphism. The concept of consciousness that motivates the hard problem is as much a theoretical construct, therefore, as the concept of life that motivates an obstinate vitalist. (shrink)

The undeniable success of neuroscience in explaining human mental states, which in the past were explained in terms of supernatural concepts, has led many modern-day scientists and philosophers to advocate physicalist methods in explaining human nature. According to this view, science, by recognizing the physiological structures of man, especially the brain and its functions, will finally be able to explain human nature with all its features through mere physical concepts. The most important challenge to this view has always been the (...) question of consciousness, or in its traditional sense, how the mind and body relate. However, contemporary scientists try to explain the phenomenon of consciousness through the physical sciences by presenting new scientific theories and concepts about the mechanisms of the brain and its relation to mental states. The purpose of this article is to show that phenomenal awareness is the most important challenge to the theory of materialism. Examining the concept of consciousness and dividing it into two parts, "perceptual consciousness" and "phenomenal consciousness", we have argued that scientific theories at best provide only an explanation of perceptual consciousness, while challenging The main science of the natural sciences is the explanation of phenomenal consciousness. But phenomenal consciousness is beyond the reach of the physical sciences because of the inherent nature of mentality, unless it recognizes first-person perspective science. (shrink)

We give a general background describing how the notion of levels of reality comes about in contemporary nonreductive approaches to the special sciences, what the notion of levels means in these approaches, its role in our scientific outlook of the world, and why it is important.

Physicalism as a metaphysical or ontological concept has maintained a dominant position since the second half of the last century to the present day. The claim that everything is physically constituted often accompanies microphysical reductionism, which assumes the existence of fundamental laws to which everything is reducible. In this context, a question regarding the status and possible autonomy of the laws of special sciences arises. The article focuses on the basic philosophical discussions between the strong, weak, and non-reductive physicalism that (...) treat the laws of special sciences in different ways, but none of which can be considered sufficiently convincing and successful. The article seeks to prove the existence of a universal mechanism that leads to the emergence of new and complex entities and regulations of their behaviour, thus justifying the autonomous status of special sciences and laws. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have argued that causation is not an objective feature of the microphysical world but rather is a perspectival phenomenon that holds only between “coarse-grained” entities such as those that figure in the special sciences. This view seems to pose a problem for arguments for physicalism that rely on the alleged causal completeness of physics. In this paper, I address this problem by arguing that the completeness of physics has two components, only one of which is causal. (...) These two components of completeness can be used in an argument for physicalism that is supported by strong inductive evidence even in the absence of microphysical causation. (shrink)

This essay calls attention to robust synergies between Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of dialectical critical realism and Terrence W. Deacon’s recent investigation of the geo-historical emergence of ententional or teleological phenomena, as well as important differences. Deacon has independently arrived at an understanding of absence as causally efficacious in the emergence of life and consciousness, and deploys a range of other concepts that resonate with DCR. He develops a critique both of eliminativist and monovalent approaches to ententionality, on the one hand, (...) and their panpsychist foil, on the other, and elaborates a polyvalent scientific alternative – the theory of emergent dynamics. Though this theory is not without problems, as its immanent critique reveals – and indeed in part because of these – it opens up the prospect of a mutually illuminating dialogue between DCR and metaRealism, on the one hand, and the life sciences, on the other, in which DCR/mr underlabours for these sciences, which in turn feed back into DCR/mr philosophy and social theory, thereby helping to actualize the possibility of non-positivist naturalism. (shrink)

This review essay attempts to present a coherent and reasonably unitary picture of the contemporary ‘speculative turn’ in continental philosophy as charted in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds, The Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism (2011). Avoiding a more objective yet more anodyne chapter by chapter summary, I paint an intentionally synoptic view by selecting some common concerns of the authors involved, and group them under five ‘core themes’. Throughout, I try to keep open the comparative channel (...) with the realist tenets of critical realism, and conclude vouching for the necessity for more bridge-building works to appear in the future. (shrink)

According to the so-called Hempel’s Dilemma, the thesis of physicalism is either false or empty. Our intention in this paper is not to propose a solution to the Dilemma, but rather to argue as follows: to the extent that Hempel’s Dilemma applies to physicalism it equally applies to any theory that gives a deep-structure and changeable account of our experience or of high-level theories. In particular, we will show that it also applies to mind-body dualistic theories. The scope of Hempel’s (...) Dilemma turns out to be very wide: it is a special case of a general sceptical argument against changeable deep-structure theories in and outside science. (shrink)

Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical. But what does it mean to say that everything is physical? Daniel Stoljar has recently argued that no account of the physical is available which allows for a formulation of physicalism that is both possibly true and deserving of the name. As against this claim, I argue that a version of the via negativa—roughly, the view that the physical is to be characterised in terms of the nonmental—provides just such an account.

Nearly all of us would accept that at least some of our thoughts – desires, beliefs, and intentions, for example – can be causally responsible for movements in our bodies. Starting in antiquity, and especially since Descartes, philosophers have deployed this claim as the pivotal premise in an increasingly popular line of argument against dualism. The purpose of this paper is to show that, in the Phaedo, Socrates uses this very same claim as the pivotal premise in a surprisingly powerful (...) two-part argument for dualism. (shrink)

Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature (...) of their referents in a partial and incomplete manner, a posteriori physicalism is safe. (shrink)

I respond to Chalmers’ (2006, 2010) objection to the Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) by showing that his objection is faced with a dilemma that ultimately undercuts its force. Chalmers argues that no version of PCS can posit psychological features that are both physically explicable and capable of explaining our epistemic situation. In response, I show that what Chalmers calls ‘our epistemic situation’ admits either of a phenomenal or of a topic-neutral characterization, neither of which supports Chalmers’ objection. On the one (...) hand, if our epistemic situation is characterized phenomenally, then Chalmers’ demand that PCS should explain our epistemic situation is misplaced. PCS can explain our epistemic situation only if there is a reductive explanation of consciousness. But according to PCS, no reductive explanation of consciousness can be given. On the other hand, if our epistemic situation is characterized topic-neutrally, then PCS is not only physically explicable, but it also explains our epistemic situation. Either way, PCS is safe. (shrink)

The aim of this editorial introduction is twofold. First, Sects. 1–8 offer a critical introduction to the metaphysical character of physicalism. In those sections, I present and evaluate different ways in which proponents of physicalism have made explicit the metaphysical dependence that is said to hold between the non-physical and the physical. Some of these accounts are found to be problematic; others are shown to be somewhat more promising. In the end, some important lessons are drawn and different options for (...) physicalists are presented. Second, in Sect.9, the six papers that comprise the special issue are introduced and summarized. (shrink)

It is often said that there are two varieties of identity theory. Type-identity theorists interpret physicalism as the claim that every property is identical to a physical property, while token-identity theorists interpret it as the claim that every particular is identical to a physical particular. The aim of this paper is to undermine the distinction between the two. Drawing on recent work connecting generalized identity to truth-maker semantics, I demonstrate that these interpretations are logically equivalent. I then argue that each (...) has the resources to resolve problems facing the other. (shrink)

2. The Contingency and A posteriority Constraint: A formulation of the thesis must make physicalism come out contingent and a posteriori. First, physicalism is a contingent truth, if it is a truth. This means that physicalism could have been false, i.e. there are counterfactual worlds in which physicalism is false, for example, counterfactual worlds in which there are miracle -performing angels.[9] Moreover, if physicalism is true, our knowledge of its truth is a posteriori. This is to say that there are (...) ways the world could turn out to be such that physicalism is false. For example, if there are miracle -performing angels, then physicalism is false. So there are worlds considered as actual in which physicalism is false.[10] For short, call this ‘the a posteriority constraint’.[11]. (shrink)

Perhaps more controversial than whether physicalism is true is what exactly would have to be true for physicalism to be true. Everyone agrees that, intuitively at least, physicalism is the thesis that there is nothing over and above the physical. The disagreements arise in how to get beyond this intuitive formulation. Until about ten years ago, participants in this debate were concerned primarily with answering two questions. First, what is it for a property, kind, relation, or individual to be a (...) physical one? (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally treated physicalism as an empirically informed metaphysical thesis. This approach faces a well-known problem often referred to as Hempel’s dilemma: formulations of physicalism tend to be either false or indeterminate. The generally preferred strategy to address this problem involves an appeal to a hypothetical complete and ideal physical theory. After demonstrating that this strategy is not viable, I argue that we should redefine physicalism as an interdisciplinary research program seeking to explain the mental in terms of the (...) physical that encompasses the physical sciences, the psychological and brain sciences, and philosophy. Redefining physicalism in this way improves upon previous reconstructive accounts while avoiding the indeterminacy associated with orthodox forms of futurist physicalism. (shrink)

Is physicalism compatible with either panpsychism or so-called fundamental mentality ? Minimal physicalism, I contend, is compatible with both. We should therefore jettison the No Fundamental Mentality constraint, a proposed constraint on the definition of the physical, not to mention the false limits it places on physicalist theories of mind.

One of the most pressing challenges that occupy the Russellian panpsychist’s agenda is to come up with a way to reconcile the traditional argument from categorical properties (Seager, 2006; Alter & Nagasawa, 2015) with H. H. Mørch’s dispositionalism-friendly argument from the experience of causation (2014, 2018, 2020) — on the way to a unitary, all-encompassing case for the view. In this regard, Mørch claims that, via the commitment to the Identity theory of properties, one can consistently hold both panpsychist arguments (...) without contradiction (2020: 281) — I shall refer to such proposal as Reconciliation. In my paper, I shall argue that this is not the case. To this extent, I will first consider H. Taylor’s argument that the Identity theorists have the exact same resources as the dispositionalists (as, after careful enquiry, their views on the metaphysics of properties turn out to coincide (2018: 1438)), and thus contend that Reconciliation fails to obtain. Then, I will suggest that one can avoid the problem and reconcile the arguments by adopting a different version of the powerful qualities view, namely the Compound view — and thus advance a reformulated version of the claim, i.e. Reconciliation*. Finally, even though pursuing my proposed solution might expose Russellian panpsychism to the risk of epiphenomenalism, I shall conclude that such specific form of epiphenomenalism is a rather benign one, and thus that, via Reconciliation*, the constitution of a unitary case for panpsychism as a positive proposal (and not as a mere alternative to dualism and physicalism) can be achieved. (shrink)

In my paper, I shall provide a reading of Diogenes of Apollonia such that his understanding of the metaphysics of differentiation and of individual ensoulment may constitute an ingenious answer to the problems of his time. To this extent, I will argue that Diogenes' worldview solves the difficulties of Anaxagoras' metaphysics and successfully integrates mentality in a causally closed conception of nature. Finally, I will suggest that a Diogenes-inspired approach might be relevant to treat some pressing concerns in the contemporary (...) philosophy of mind – thus demonstrating how his production might offer some interesting solutions for the problems of our time too. (shrink)

The argument from causal closure of the physical is usually considered the most powerful argument in favor of the ontological doctrine of physicalism. Many authors, most notably Papineau, assume that CCP implies that physicalism is supported by physics. I demonstrate, however, that physical science has no bias in the ontological debate between proponents of physicalism and dualism. I show that the arguments offered for CCP are effective only against the accounts of mental causation based on the action of the mental (...) forces of a Newtonian nature, i.e. those which manifest themselves by causing accelerations. However, it is conceivable and possible that mental causation is manifested through the redistribution of energy, momentum and other conserved quantities in the system, brought about by altering the state probability distribution within the living system and leading to anomalous correlations of neural processes. After arguing that a probabilistic, interactionist model of mental causation is conceivable, which renders the argument from causal closure of the physical ineffective, I point to some basic features that such a model must have in order to be intelligible. At the same time, I indicate the way that conclusive testing of CCP can be done within the theoretical framework of physics. (shrink)