A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy)

Cambridge Core - Logic - A Physicalist Manifesto - by Andrew Melnyk. A Physicalist Manifesto. Thoroughly Modern Materialism. A Physicalist Manifesto.
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Thoroughly Modern Materialism

William Jaworski - - International Philosophical Quarterly 45 1: Comments on Melnyk's A Physicalist Manifesto. Joseph Levine - manuscript. Can Physicalism Be Non-Reductive? Andrew Melnyk - - Philosophy Compass 3 6: Jiyuan Yu - - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 3 3: Physicalism, Dualism, and Metaphysical Gridlock. Katalin Balog - manuscript.

Consciousness & Physiology I

Jules Vuillemin - - Grazer Philosophische Studien Raam Gokhale - - Philosophy Pathways Churchland - - MIT Press. Added to PP index Total downloads 87 71, of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 1 , of 2,, How can I increase my downloads?


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A Physicalist Manifesto

What, then, is it to say that a given token y is physically realized? A natural suggestion is that y is physically realized iff it is realized by x , where x is itself physical. But this is insufficient. That condition might, however, itself be hostile to physicalism, even if it is a condition satisfied by a physical type. Physicalism plainly needs to be formulated in a way that rules out the imagined situation. The scenario would then be ruled out not by means of what is implied by saying that this particular token of F is physically realized but by means of the generality of the physicalist thesis itself.

The problematic scenario is here ruled out by means of clause ii. If realizationism is true, then, we could describe nearly every type of thing there actually is in the world using purely physical and quasi-logical language.

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Such commitments may prompt one to hope that a weaker formulation of physicalism can be found. If we say that nonphysical properties supervene on physical properties, this supervenience claim by itself fails to imply that the distribution of nonphysical properties is to be explained by the physical facts. The necessitation of the nonphysical may be merely brute necessitation. An adequate formulation of physicalism must imply that the necessitation is appropriately subject to explanation.

While I expect Melnyk is right about this, there remains a good question as to whether a supervenience formulation constructed to accommodate the explanatory requirement may be weaker than a realizationist formulation in a way that makes it preferable on grounds other than some nebulous fear of reductionism. Perhaps one would prefer a truly minimal formulation.

Physicalist Manifesto, A: Thoroughly Modern Materialism. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy.

At one point, in fact, Melnyk considers a formulation that seems designed for just this purpose; he considers a proposal to formulate physicalism as the conjunction of some supervenience thesis with the denial that the necessitation is brute But what does reductionism come to anyway? Melnyk tackles this important question in the third chapter, refusing to take for granted that the notion is transparent.

Realizationism does imply CR, he argues, but the commitment does not render the doctrine implausible, as CR itself implies less than you might think. It is one of the considerable merits of the book that it shows how one could be a reductionist in the sense of CR without being a reductionist in other senses that may be thought problematic. Worries about the methodological implications of reductionism, the relevance of multiple realizability, the autonomy of the special sciences, and so on -- these are all dispatched in a satisfying fashion.

One of the best known of these worries is that reductionism may imply that the only legitimate causal explanations are physical, that the nonphysical ends up being in some way epiphenomenal. This worry is sufficiently important that the entirety of the fourth chapter is devoted to its relief. Melnyk pursues two major tasks in that chapter.


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First, he offers a diagnosis of the fear of epiphenomenalism, arguing persuasively that it arises primarily because of a failure to attend to the difference between a situation in which a nonphysical property is nomically linked to an underlying physical property and one in which the nonphysical property is linked to a physical property by the realization relation and is, thereby, not entirely distinct from it.

Second, he offers a full-fledged theory of causation and causal explanation, the details of which can be used to demonstrate that realization physicalism is consistent with nonphysical causation. The theory on offer is a version of regularity theory whereby two events are causally related when subsumed by a logically contingent regularity. Melnyk can then show that realization physicalism does not imply that nonphysical regularities have such undercutters; since nothing more than lacking an undercutter is needed for a regularity to confer genuine causal relations, nonphysical events can be causally related simply by being subsumed under a regularity.

Here, I think, he will find most dissent from fellow physicalists -- including myself.

A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism - Andrew Melnyk - Google Книги

For it seems to me that the motivations for any regularity theory of causation are at odds with the scientific realism presumed by any physicalism. Physicalists can have no epistemic qualms about going beyond the observable to the merely theoretical. But the only serious motivation for adopting a regularity theory of causation, so far as I can see, is a fear of going beyond the observable: Interestingly, his theory cannot accommodate the intuition that there could be a world in which every regularity is a coincidence, for the only way a regularity can fail to be cause-constituting is by there being an undercutter explanation of it -- which requires the existence of some other cause-constituting regularity.

We turn finally to the epistemic status of physicalism as addressed in the last two chapters.