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Metaphysics of mind :: Physicalism

• Formulating physicalism [3]
• Identity theory [3]
• Eliminative materialism [3]
• Anomalous monism [3]
• Physicalism, misc [3]

Formulating physicalism

See also: Conceptual analysis and a priori entailment, Panpsychism, Russellian monism, Physicalism, misc, Supervenience and physicalism, Nonreductive materialism, Emergence.

• Janice Dowell (2006). The physical: Empirical, not metaphysical.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 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]
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2006/00000131/00000001/00005983
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/188M7R012LQ01127.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/188m7r012lq01127/fulltext.pdf
  
• Bryan Frances (online). Worthwhile physicalist theses without anything like physicalism.   (More)
• Barbara Montero (2001). Post-physicalism.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://barbara.antinomies.org/papers/PostforJCS.doc
  
• Barbara Montero (2006). Physicalism in an infinitely decomposable world.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all fundamental phenomena are physical, turns out false, for in such a world, there are no fundamental phenomena, and so fundamental phenomena determine nothing. While some take physicalism necessarily to posit a fundamental level, here I present a thesis of physicalism that allows for its truth even in an infinitely decomposable world
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/erke/2006/00000064/00000002/00001577
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/F17G444071TK154H.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/f17g444071tk154h/fulltext.pdf
  
• Barbara Montero (1999). The body problem.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624(199906)33:2<183:TBP>2.0.CO;2-5
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/1999/00000033/00000002/art00002
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624(199906)33:2<183:TBP>2.0.CO;2-5
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/nous/1999/00000033/00000002/art00149
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0029-4624.00149
  
• Barbara Montero (2005). What is the physical?   (More)
• Christian Nimtz & M. Schutte (2003). On physicalism, physical properties, and panpsychism.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(de)/philosophie/personen/nimtz/Nimtz_040301_PhysicalismSUBMITTEDPRINTED_FINE.pdf
  
• Jessica Wilson (2006). On characterizing the physical.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components,¹
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/a41q21t35245r515/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/phil/2006/00000131/00000001/00005984
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/A41Q21T35245R515.pdf
  

Identity theory

See also: Kripke's modal argument, Panpsychism, Anomalous monism, Reduction and multiple realizability, Token identity.

• Ted Honderich (1994). Functionalism, identity theories, the union theory.   (More)
• Ullin Place (online). Identity theories.   (More)
• J. J. C. Smart (1959). Sensations and brain processes.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(195904)68:2<141:SABP>2.0.CO;2-S
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(195904)68:2<141:SABP>2.0.CO;2-S
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/780183986.pdf
  
• J. J. C. Smart (1960). Sensations and brain processes: A rejoinder to dr Pitcher and mr Joske.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108(195904)68:2<141:SABP>2.0.CO;2-S
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a780183986~fulltext=713240930
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/780183986.pdf
  

Eliminative materialism

See also: Eliminativism, Eliminativism about qualia, Connectionism and eliminativism, Folk psychology and theory of mind, Eliminativism.

• Megan Wallace (online). Mental fictionalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Abstract: Suppose you are somewhat persuaded by the arguments for Eliminative Materialism, but are put off by the view itself. For instance, you might be sympathetic to one or more of the following considerations: (1) that folk psychology is a bad theory and will be soon replaced by cognitive science or neuroscience, (2) that folk psychology will never be vindicated by cognitive science, (3) that folk psychology makes ontological commitments to weird or spooky things that no proper science will admit the existence of, (4) that folk psychology seems to lead to a sort of epiphenomenalism (which is yet another thing that’s weird and spooky), and (5) that folk psychology seems to lead to the conclusion that mental content is either determined by things outside the head or is completely indeterminate, neither of which is appealing. Yet in spite of your sympathy for any one of (1)-(5), you may nonetheless cringe at the consequence of them—that is, you may be unwilling to accept the Eliminative Materialist’s radical claim that (i) there are no beliefs, desires, etc., and (ii) we should stop all talk to that quantifies to the contrary. To relieve the conflict, I propose Mental Fictionalism: the view that we are fictionalists about mental states
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.unc.edu/~megw/MentFic.pdf
  

Anomalous monism

See also: Social externalism, Interpretivist approaches, The normativity of content, Identity theory, Nonreductive materialism, Token identity.

• Michael Antony (2003). Davidson's argument for monism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   Two criticisms of Davidson's argument for monism are presented. The first is that there is no obvious way for the anomalism of the mental to do any work in his argument. Certain implicit premises, on the other hand, entail monism independently of the anomalism of the mental, but they are question-begging. The second criticism is that even if Davidson's argument is sound, the variety of monism that emerges is extremely weak at best. I show that by constructing ontologically ``hybrid'' events that are consistent with the premises and assumptions of Davidson's argument, but entail ontological dualism.My guess is thatif you want to get a lot of physicalism out [ofDavidson's argument], you're going to have to put a lot of physicalism in.Jerry Fodor 1989, 159
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://consc.net/cgi/go.fcgi?id=ANTDAF&free=0&u=http://www.springerlink.com/index/R427811071317478.pdf
  http://research.haifa.ac.il/~antony/papers/Davidson.htm
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/r427811071317478/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/synt/2003/00000135/00000001/00260564
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=260564&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/R427811071317478.pdf
  
• Neil Campbell (online). Anomalous monism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: identity theory , usually attributed to J.J.C. Smart (Smart, 1959) and U.T. Place (Place, 1956), claimed that kinds of mental states are identical to kinds of brain states. Sensations of pain, for instance, were said to be identical to the firing of C-fibres or some such type of neurological state. According to this view, then, pain, conceived as a _kind_ of mental state, is said to be _reduced_ to a certain kind of neurological state. The reduction envisaged here was modelled on the kind of reduction seen in other areas of the sciences. For instance, lightning can be said to be reduced to a rapid discharge of electrons in the atmosphere. When such a reduction is made scientists are not saying that there are two phenomena that are correlated, but rather that lightning is
• M. de Pinedo (2006). Anomalous monism: Oscillating between dogmas.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ugr.es/~pinedo/papers/synt116r1.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5264420&PDF=1
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/synt/2006/00000148/00000001/00006218
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/18256U00J6342R25.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/18256u00j6342r25/fulltext.pdf
  
• Ted Honderich (1984). Donald Davidson's anomalous monism and the champion of mauve.   (More)
• Henry Jackman (2000). Belief, rationality, and psychophysical laws.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper argues that Davidson's claim that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of any type-type identities between mental and physical events relies on blurring the distinction between two ways of understanding this "constitutive ideal", and that no consistent understanding the constitutive ideal allows it to play the dialectical role Davidson intends for it
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://phonline.org/paper.php?keynum=854
  http://www.yorku.ca/hjackman/papers/am.html
  
• Mark Eli Kalderon (1987). Epiphenomenalism and content.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://sambuca.umdl.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/43401
  http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/dspace/handle/2027.42/43401
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/R66000872421P876.pdf
  http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/43401
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/r66000872421p876/fulltext.pdf
  
• Steven Yalowitz (online). Anomalous monism.   (More)

Physicalism, misc

See also: Materialism and dualism, Qualia and materialism, Formulating physicalism, Identity theory, Eliminative materialism, Anomalous monism, Supervenience and physicalism, Nonreductive materialism, Other psychophysical relations.

• Robert Bishop (2006). The hidden premise in the causal argument for physicalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The causal argument for physicalism is anayzed and it's key premise--the causal closure of physics--is found wanting. Therefore, a hidden premise must be added to the argument to gain its conclusion, but the hidden premise is indistinguishable from the conclusion of the causal argument. Therefore, it begs the question on physicalism
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8284.2006.00588.x
  
• Andrew Chrucky (1990). Critique of Wilfrid Sellars' Materialism.   (More)
• Pierre Jacob (2002). Some problems for reductive physicalism.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000047
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/00/47/ijn_00000047_00/ijn_00000047_00.htm
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/05/32/41/HTML/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2002.tb00228.x
  
• Joseph Levine (online). Comments on Melnyk's A Physicalist Manifesto.   (More)
• Barry Loewer (2001). From physics to physicalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The appeal of materialism lies precisely in this, in its claim to be natural metaphysics within the bounds of science. That a doctrine which promises to gratify our ambition (to know the noumenal) and our caution (not to be unscientific) should have great appeal is hardly something to be wondered at. (Putnam (1983), p.210) Materialism says that all facts, in particular all mental facts, obtain in virtue of the spatio- temporal distribution, and properties, of matter. It was, as Putnam says, “metaphysics within the bounds of science”, but only so long as science was thought to say that the world is made out of matter.1 In this century physicists have learned that there is more in the world than matter and, in any case, matter isn’t quite what it seemed to be. For this reason many philosophers who think that metaphysics should be informed by science advocate physicalism in place of materialism. Physicalism claims that all facts obtain in virtue of the distribution of the fundamental entities and properties –whatever they turn out to be- of completed fundamental physics. Later I will discuss a more precise formulation. But not all contemporary philosophers embrace physicalism. Some- and though a minority not a small or un-influential one- think that physicalism is rather the metaphysics for an unjustified scientism; i.e. it is scientistic metaphysics. Those among them that think that physicalism can be clearly formulated think that it characterizes a
• Barbara Montero & David Papineau (2005). A defense of the via negativa argument for physicalism.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/2005/00000065/00000003/art00011
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8284.2005.00556.x
  
• Tom Polger (online). A posteriori physicalism.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A consideration of the benefits of taking physicalism to be necessarily true if true, against the standard view that physicalism is at best contingently true. Presented at the 2006 Central Division meeting of the APA, in the session Themes from Jaegwon Kim, sponsored by the Society for Asian and Asian-American Philosophy
• Howard Robinson (1998). Materialism in the philosophy of mind.   (More)
• David Spurrett (ms). The completeness of physics.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The present work is focussed on the completeness of physics, or what is here called the Completeness Thesis: the claim that the domain of the physical is causally closed. Two major questions are tackled: How best is the Completeness Thesis to be formulated? What can be said in defence of the Completeness Thesis? My principal conclusions are that the Completeness Thesis can be coherently formulated, and that the evidence in favour if it significantly outweighs that against it. In opposition to those who argue that formulation is impossible because no account of what is to count as physical can be provided, I argue that as long as the purpose of the argument in which the account is to be used are borne in mind there are no significant difficulties. The account of the physical which I develop holds as physical whatever is needed to fix the likelihood of pre-theoretically given physical effects, and hypothesises in addition that no chemical, biological or psychological factors will be needed in this way. The thus formulated Completeness Thesis is coherent, and has significant empirical content. In opposition to those who defend the doctrine of emergentism by means of philosophical arguments I contend that those arguments are flawed, setting up misleading dichotomies between needlessly attenuated alternatives and assuming the truth of what is to be proved. Against those who defend emergentism by appeal to the evidence, I argue that the history of science since the nineteenth century shows clearly that the empirical credentials of the view that the world is causally closed at the level of a small number of purely physical forces and types of energy is stronger than ever, and the credentials of emergentism correspondingly weaker. In opposition to those who argue that difficulties with reductionism point to the implausibility of the Completeness Thesis I argue that completeness in no way entails the kinds of reductionism which give rise to the difficulties in question. I argue further that the truth of the Completeness Thesis is in fact compatible with a great deal of taxonomic disorder and the impossibility of any general reduction of non-fundamental descriptions to fundamental ones. In opposition to those who argue that the epistemological credentials of fundamental physical laws are poor, and that those laws should in fact be seen as false, I contend that truth preserving accounts of fundamental laws can be developed. Developing such an account, I test it by considering cases of the composition of forces and causes, where what takes place is different to what is predicted by reference to any single law, and argue that viewing laws as tendencies allows their truth to be preserved, and sense to be made of both the experimental discovery of laws, and the fact that composition enables accurate prediction in at least some cases
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/3379/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003379/01/DSTHESIS.pdf
  http://cogprints.org/3379/1/DSTHESIS.pdf
  
• Daniel Stoljar (online). Physicalism.   (More)

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