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659Can physicalism be non-reductive?Philosophy Compass 3 (6): 1281-1296. 2008.Can physicalism (or materialism) be non-reductive? I provide an opinionated survey of the debate on this question. I suggest that attempts to formulate non-reductive physicalism by appeal to claims of event identity, supervenience, or realization have produced doctrines that fail either to be physicalist or to be non-reductive. Then I treat in more detail a recent attempt to formulate non-reductive physicalism by Derk Pereboom, but argue that it fares no better.
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640Being a physicalist: How and (more importantly) whyPhilosophical Studies 74 (2): 221-241. 1994.
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564Realization and the Formulation of PhysicalismPhilosophical Studies 131 (1): 127-155. 2006.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 p…Read more
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537Conceptual and linguistic analysis: A two-step programNoûs 42 (2). 2008.This paper argues against both conceptual and linguistic analysis as sources of a priori knowledge. Whether such knowledge is possible turns on the nature of concepts. The paper's chief contention is that none of the main views about what concepts are can underwrite the possibility of such knowledge.
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517MaterialismWiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 3 (3): 281-292. 2012.Materialism is nearly universally assumed by cognitive scientists. Intuitively, materialism says that a person’s mental states are nothing over and above his or her material states, while dualism denies this. Philosophers have introduced concepts (e.g., realization, supervenience) to assist in formulating the theses of materialism and dualism with more precision, and distinguished among importantly different versions of each view (e.g., eliminative materialism, substance dualism, emergentism).…Read more
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464Can Metaphysics Be Naturalized? And If So, How?In Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid (eds.), Scientific metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 79-95. 2013.This is a critical, but sympathetic, examination of the manifesto for naturalized metaphysics that forms the first chapter of James Ladyman and Don Ross's 2006 book, Every Thing Must Go, but it has wider implications than this description suggests.
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443Pereboom’s Robust Non-reductive PhysicalismErkenntnis 79 (5): 1191-1207. 2014.Derk Pereboom has recently elaborated a formulation of non-reductive physicalism in which supervenience does not play the central role and realization plays no role at all; he calls his formulation “robust non-reductive physicalism”. This paper argues that for several reasons robust non-reductive physicalism is inadequate as a formulation of physicalism: it can only rule out fundamental laws of physical-to-mental emergence by stipulating that there are no such laws; it fails to entail the super…Read more
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421In Defense of a Realization Formulation of PhysicalismTopoi 37 (3): 483-493. 2018.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.
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386Some Evidence for PhysicalismIn Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation, Imprint Academic. pp. 155-172. 2003.This paper presents an irreducibly inductive argument for physicalism based on the causal closure of the physical (for which it argues), and defends it against various detractors.
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346Inference to the best explanation and other mindsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (4): 482-91. 1994.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 on…Read more
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344Naturalism as a Philosophical ParadigmPhilo 12 (2): 188-199. 2009.I develop the conjecture that “naturalism” in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like Thomas Kuhn’s sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-to-day investigative practice. I take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them.
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308Comments on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical RealizationPhilosophical Studies 148 (1): 113-123. 2010.This paper concerns Sydney Shoemaker's view, presented in his book, Physical Realization (Oxford University Press, 2007), of how mental properties are realized by physical properties. That view aims to avoid the "too many minds" problem to which he seems to be led by his further view that human persons are not token-identical with their bodies. The paper interprets and criticizes Shoemaker's view.
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304Philosophy and the study of its historyMetaphilosophy 39 (2). 2008.This paper is guided by, and begins to make plausible, the idea that there can be a naturalistic metaphilosophy, i.e., an inquiry that takes philosophy as an object of study in something like the way that contemporary (naturalistic) philosophy of science takes science as an object of study. The paper’s more specific goal is to ventilate certain provocative speculations concerning the character of philosophy’s cognitive achievement, especially over time. But this more specific goal will be appr…Read more
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293Review of Michael Rea's, 'World without design: the ontological consequences of naturalism' (review)Mind 113 (451): 575-581. 2004.Substantial review of Michael Rea's, World without design: the ontological consequences of naturalism. It is an improved version of my paper, "Rea On Naturalism" in Philo, 2004, revised in light of Rea's comments on the earlier paper. The discussion focuses on Rea’s case for three of his theses: that naturalism must be viewed as a ‘research programme’; that naturalism ‘cannot be adopted on the basis of evidence’, as he puts it; and that naturalists cannot be justified in accepting realism abou…Read more
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283Two cheers for reductionism, or, the dim prospects for nonreductive materialismPhilosophy of Science 62 (3): 370-88. 1995.I argue that a certain version of physicalism, which is viewed by both its admirers and its detractors as non-reductionist, in fact entails two claims which, though not reductionist in the currently most popular sense of 'reductionist', conform to the spirit of reductionism sufficiently closely to compromise its claim to be a comprehensively non-reductionist version of physicalism. Putatively non-reductionist versions of physicalism in general, I suggest, are likely to be non-reductionist only i…Read more
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277How to keep the 'physical' in physicalismJournal of Philosophy 94 (12): 622-637. 1997.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 h…Read more
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259Functionalism and Psychological Reductionism: Friends, Not FoesIn Maurice Kenneth Davy Schouten & Huibert Looren de Jong (eds.), The matter of the mind: philosophical essays on psychology, neuroscience, and reduction, Blackwell. pp. 31-50. 2007.The paper argues that a broadly functionalist picture of psychological phenomena is quite consistent with at least one interesting thesis of psychological reductionism.
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258Grounding and the Formulation of PhysicalismIn Ken Aizawa & Carl Gillett (eds.), Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 249-269. 2016.Grounding is all the rage in analytical metaphysics. But here I give three reasons for not appealing to a primitive relation of grounding in formulating physicalism. (1) It probably can't do the key job it would need to do. (2) We don't need it, since we already have realization. (3) It is probably not even consistent with physicalism.
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257A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern MaterialismCambridge University Press. 2003.A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope…Read more
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214Searle's abstract argument against strong AISynthese 108 (3): 391-419. 1996.Discussion of Searle's case against strong AI has usually focused upon his Chinese Room thought-experiment. In this paper, however, I expound and then try to refute what I call his abstract argument against strong AI, an argument which turns upon quite general considerations concerning programs, syntax, and semantics, and which seems not to depend on intuitions about the Chinese Room. I claim that this argument fails, since it assumes one particular account of what a program is. I suggest an a…Read more
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207Realization Realized (review)Philosophical Books 50 (3): 185-195. 2009.This is a critical study of Sydney Shoemaker's, Physical Realization (Oxford University Press, 2007). It focuses on (i) the relationship between his subset theory of realization and the higher-order property theory of realization, and (ii) his attempt to solve the problem of mental causation.
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204Rea on NaturalismPhilo 7 (2): 131-137. 2004.My goal in this paper is to provide critical discussion of Michael Rea’s case for three of the controversial theses defended in his World Without Design (Oxford University Press, 2002): (1) that naturalism must be viewed as what he calls a “research program”; (2) that naturalism “cannot be adopted on the basis of evidence,” as he puts it; and (3) that naturalists cannot be justified in accepting realism about material objects.
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191‘The Conceptual Link from Physical to Mental’, by Kirk, Robert: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. xii + 228, £35 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3): 596-599. 2014.Review of Robert Kirk's The Conceptual Link From Physical To Mental (Oxford University Press, 2013).
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188Critical Study of Thomas Nagel's "The Last Word" (review)Philosophical Books 40 (1): 14-17. 1999.This critical study takes Nagel's book to task for its obscurity, and for its under-argued rejection of naturalism.
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184Papineau on the intuition of distinctnessSWIF Philosophy of Mind 4 (1). 2002.Critical comments on David Papineau's idea that people find physicalism about phenomenal consciousness unbelievable because they commit what he calls the 'antipathetic fallacy'.
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183What Do Philosophers Know? A Critical Study of Williamson's "The Philosophy of Philosophy" (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 80 (1): 297-307. 2010.This is a critical notice of Timothy Williamson's, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Blackwell, 2007). It focuses on criticizing the book's two main positive proposals: that we should “replace true belief by knowledge in a principle of charity constitutive of content”, and that “the epistemology of metaphysically modal thinking is tantamount to a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking”.
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182World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (review)Mind 113 (451): 575-581. 2004.A critical study of Rea's book, focusing on his case for three theses: that naturalism must be viewed as a ‘research programme’; that naturalism ‘cannot be adopted on the basis of evidence’; and that naturalists cannot be justified in accepting realism about material objects.
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181This critical study aims mainly to do two things: (i) throw some cold water on the claim that supervenience can be used to formulate a doctrine of non-reductive physicalism, and (ii) rebut an argument for physicalism offered (separately) by David Papineau and Barry Loewer. The title alludes to the following lyric from "Mary Poppins", and was intended to hint that there is less to supervenience than meets the eye: It's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Even though the sound of it is something qu…Read more
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174PhysicalismIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 65-84. 2003.Written with a student audience in mind, this article surveys the issues raises by the attempt to formulate, argue for, and explore the implications of a comprehensively physicalist view of the world.
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173PhysicalismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (3): 573-587. 1991.Supervenience physicalism holds that all facts, of whatever type, globally supervene upon the physical facts, even though neither type-type nor token-token nonphysical-physical identities hold. I argue that, invoked like this, supervenience is metaphysically mysterious, needing explanation. I reject two explanations (Lewis and Forrest). I argue that the best explanation of the appearance of supervenience is an error-theoretic, projectivist one: there are no nonphysical properties, but we erroneo…Read more