Andrew Melnyk

When a belief is cited as part of the explanation of an agent's behaviour, it seems that the belief is explanatorily relevant in virtue of its content. In his Explaining Behavior, Dretske presents an account of belief, content, and explanation according to which this can be so. I supply some examples of beliefs whose explanatory relevance in virtue of content apparently cannot be accounted for in the Dretskean way. After considering some possible responses to this challenge, I end by discussing how serious these counterexamples are for Dretske's account.

We experience the intuition of distinctness when, for example, we attend introspectively to the phenomenal redness of a current visual sensation and it seems to us that that very property could not literally be a physical property of neural activity in a certain tiny region of our brain. The book begins by arguing that the intuition of distinctness underlies certain otherwise puzzling attitudes manifested in debates both inside and outside philosophy about whether physicalism (or materialism) can accommodate phenomenal properties (or qualia). It then argues systematically against the dualist suggestion that the intuition of distinctness gives us reason to reject the physicalist view that phenomenal properties are physical, and to adopt property dualism instead. In the course of the argument, it defends an unorthodox version of representationalism and offers positive accounts of what makes our introspective knowledge of phenomenal properties special, how introspection could tell us that an introspected property is physical, and what the subjectivity of phenomenal properties could be. Finally, after critically surveying previous attempts to account for the intuition of distinctness consistently with physicalism, it elaborates a novel explanation of the intuition of distinctness. The intuition arises because introspection is, in a certain way, conceptually encapsulated, as a result of which we are unable to do something that we can do in the case of every other kind of identity claim that we believe or entertain, and therefore unable to believe, or even to imagine believing, that an introspected phenomenal property is physical.

Late twentieth-century physicalism—here understood, broadly, as a comprehensive view about the nature of contingent reality, rather than, narrowly, as a view about the relation of the mental to the physical—is widely regarded as the descendant of the materialist hypotheses familiar from the history of philosophy both ancient and modern. This chapter contends that contemporary physicalism differs significantly from historical hypotheses of materialism, significantly enough that the prospects for physicalism cannot be inferred from those for materialism. The chapter brings out these differences by identifying the two main challenges faced by philosophers who want to revive the materialist hypotheses of earlier centuries, and then indicating the author’s possibly idiosyncratic view of how these challenges are best overcome. The first challenge is to formulate physicalism adequately, so that it is interesting but neither obviously true nor obviously false; the second challenge is to specify what would count as empirical evidence for an adequately-formulated hypothesis of physicalism. The chapter’s survey of responses to these two challenges constitutes an opinionated history of central aspects of the past fifty (or so) years of philosophical reflection on physicalism.

Can two-dimensional semantics provide a foundation for linguistic analysis, i.e., the conceptual analysis of words in a natural language? I make a case for skepticism. I argue that, even if the two-dimensionalist account of linguistic analysis is true, practitioners of linguistic analysis who reflect on the account have an undermining defeater for the belief-forming process that is claimed to operate in linguistic analysis. The defeater is the fact that, given the available evidence, the two-dimensionalist account of linguistic understanding is not clearly more probable than an externalist account on which linguistic analysis does not constitute a reliable belief-forming process.

This paper argues in unprecedented empirical and philosophical detail that, given only what science has discovered about pain, we should prefer the materialist hypothesis that pains are purely material over the dualist hypothesis that they are immaterial. The empirical findings cited provide strong evidence for the thesis of empirical supervenience: that to every sort of introspectible change over time in pains, or variation among pains at a time, there corresponds in fact a certain sort of simultaneous neural change over time, or variation at a time. The empirical supervenience of pain on the neural is shown in turn to favor the hypothesis that pains are, in a sense that is made precise, purely material.

Gillett's goal is to articulate and defend a view of the nature of thought that opposes the widely-accepted view that thoughts are internal states whose representational content is owed to causal connections with the environment, and whose interactions play a part in the causation of behavior. According to Gillett, discourse about human mental activity is not about goings-on in an inner realm of causal representational states". What is it about, then? Gillett's alternative view rests entirely upon an account of the nature of concepts. "To grasp a concept is to master a principled way of responding to the world involving techniques of selected attention and directed search for criterial information which reveals whether a presentation instances the concept in question". Two features of Gillett's account deserve emphasis. First, it turns out that responding to the world in "a principled way" is not merely a matter of responding to it in a de facto rule-governed way: "In using a concept, a thinker does not merely respond but can represent to himself the fact that a norm governs that response and is independent of it". Second, the responses to the world which concept-mastery requires are meant to be public responses, apparently taking the form of judgements expressed in a natural language.

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. The 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 realisation physicalism more precisely, I explore a way in which, in principle, we could obtain evidence of its truth.

A standard objection to any version of physicalism, an objection which may be encountered both in conversation and in the literature, is that there is just no reason to be a physicalist; even if there are no good arguments against physicalism, there are none for it either. My main aim in this paper is to defeat this objection by supplying a trio of positive reasons for adopting a particular brand of physicalism, which I call realization physicalism. The arguments I shall give are addressed not to the supporters of rival brands of physicalism but to the comprehensive anti-physicalist - the objector who wishes not to accept any brand of physicalism at all - and their general thrust is that it is much harder to be a comprehensive anti-physicalist than might at first appear.

Twenty years ago, Richard Boyd suggested that physicalism could be formulated by appeal to a notion of realization, with no appeal to the identity of the non-physical with the physical. In (Melnyk 2003), I developed this suggestion at length, on the basis of one particular account of realization. I now ask what happens if you try to formulate physicalism on the basis of other accounts of realization, accounts due to LePore and Loewer and to Shoemaker. Having explored two new formulations of physicalism, I conclude that my 2003 formulation remains the most promising.

Robert Pargetter has argued that we know other minds through an inference to the best explanation. My aim is to show, by criticising Pargetter's account, that this approach to the problem of other minds cannot, as it stands, deliver the goods; it might be part of the right response to the problem, but it cannot be the whole story. More precisely, I will claim that Pargetter does not successfully reconstruct how ordinary people in everyday life come reasonably to believe in other minds, given only the gross behavioural evidence actually available to them. I will suggest, contrary to both Pargetter in particular and this approach in general, that reference to one's own case does, after all, play an indispensable evidential role in the justification of belief in other minds, something which obviously marks an important disanalogy between the case of other minds and that of such theoretical entities as electrons.

Any philosopher sympathetic to physicaIism (or materiaIism) will allow that there is some sense in which ordinary objects---tables and chairs, etc.---are physicaI. But what sense, exactly? John Post holds a view implying that every ordinary object is identical with some or other spatio-temporal sum of fundamental entities. I begin by deploying a modal argument intended to show that ordinary objects, for example elephants, are not identical with spatio-temporal sums of such entities. Then I claim that appeal to David Lewis’s counterpart theory, even if acceptable in principle, would not permit Post to make a plausible reply to this argument. Finally, I sketch an alternative account of ordinary objects, which does not require identity with spatio-temporal sums of fundamental physical entities, and argue that, despite Post’s protestations, this account is acceptably physicalist: his identity claims are not required for physicalism

In this paper I pour a little cold water on claims of global supervenience, not by arguing that they are false, and not by arguing that they possess no philosophical utility whatsoever, but by building a case for the following conditional conclusion: if you expect claims of global supervenience to play a certain role in a certain metaphysical project, then you will be disappointed, since they cannot play such a role. The metaphysical project is to give an illuminating and suitably physicalist account of the relations between properties instantiated at different levels of reality. The paper makes a prima facie case for holding that claims of global supervenience can provide no illumination in such an account, a case that emerges when the metaphysics of global supervenience is probed a little more deeply than is customary.

This paper introduces the term "Hempel's Dilemma" to refer to the following challenge to any formulation of physicalism that appeals to the content of physics: if physical properties are those mentioned as such in current physics, then physicalism is probably false; but if they are those mentioned as such in a completed physics, then, since we have no idea what completed physics will look like, the resulting formulation of physicalism will lack content that is determinable by us now. It shows how the first horn of Hempel's Dilemma can be avoided. The key is an account of what is required for the acceptance of physicalism according to which to accept physicalism does not require assigning to physicalism a high probability, merely a higher probability than is assigned to any of its relevant rivals. This account of acceptance is shown to satisfy all the intuitive demands of the scientific realist, so that to be a physicalist is simply to be a scientific realist regarding physicalism.