Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In fact these two threats—the no-determinate-content and the possibility-of-fundamental-mentality—should be understood as alternative interpretations of the second horn of Hempel’s dilemma and treated separately. As I shall argue below, in the absence of a suitable response to the first interpretation, the second one is beside the point.
I allow to remain implicit the widely accepted assumption that physical (non-mental) events are not systematically overdetermined by mental and physical (non-mental) causes. I further allow that both (P) and (NM) may be satisfied in the absence of mental-physical (non-mental) identification at the level of types.
Many have been struck by the paradoxical ring of this thesis, but it need not have “the effect of making the idea of physical reduction of the mental a simple verbal contradiction,” as Kim (2005: 160) warns. It could be taken as equivalent to the thesis that mental events “can be identified without using mental categories” (Papineau 2001: 12), which carries no comparably eliminativist overtones; or, alternatively, it may be interpreted as saying that mental events are realized by non-mental events, where ‘realization’ does not connote identity (with anything non-mental).
Is the philosophically significant point that practitioners of the special sciences must be prepared to pursue their problems into any other science at all, and not just into the sciences of the relatively lower-levels? But the same must be true in the case of physics, or else the possibility, made vivid by the second horn of Hempel’s dilemma, that future physics might “include in its ontology outright reference to the mental” (Gillett and Witmer, p. 306) may safely be ignored.
For a different response to Gillett and Witmer’s arguments, see Montero and Papineau (2005).
It may be that Gillett and Witmer believe (CP) to derive its support solely from physical findings, so that the physiological findings with which Spurrett and Papineau are impressed simply do not enter the dialectical picture. The “appeal of the Causal Argument,” they write, “appears to derive from” the warrant we enjoy for (CP); but given that the evidence we currently posses for (CNM) is comparatively scanty, it is the original Causal Argument that offers physicalists “a much better chance of successfully warranting their beliefs” (p. 308). Yet this can hardly be so if the evidence for (CP) just is the evidence for (CNM), which, rightly or wrongly, Spurrett and Papineau evidently believe it to be.
To clarify, the contrast in entailment being drawn is between what follows from the assumption that fundamental physics is complete, and what follows solely from the assumption that the realm of the non-mental (inclusive of the various special sciences) is complete.
It is easy to see why: a denial of the completeness of physics (and in particular an affirmation that some physical goings-on cannot be explained except by recourse to irreducible mental forces) may with justification be considered a hallmark of traditional dualism, and a physicalism compatible with it would be a physicalism only in name; see Kim (1989) for discussion.
Searlean “emergence” does not, of course, entail the falsity of the causal completeness of physics. But this is a mere accidental feature of the example, and makes no difference for present purposes. One may simply substitute another recognizably anti-physicalist theory (perhaps along the lines of the emergent functionalism discussed in Welshon 2002) according to which (CP) and (P) are false consistently with the truth of (CNM) and (NM), to illustrate the way in which a characterization of the ‘physical’ as the ‘non-mental’ results in too sloppy a taxonomy for serious use in the philosophy of mind.
See Stoljar (2001a) for discussion.
I wish to thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
I note in passing that there may yet be room for reasonable doubt about the strength of the inductive evidence against emergent phenomena, in view of the character of the experimental methodologies whereby the pertinent evidence is amassed (see Robert Bishop 2006); but nothing in my argument requires taking a stance on the issue one way or the other.
What warrants the belief in physicalist supervenience, according to Papineau’s (1990) argument, is that it follows from (CP). (CNM) may thus be deployed in reaching the similar conclusion that everything supervenes on the non-mental (to the extent his argument works), but the underspecification produced by the relevant substituens makes room for a violation of physicalist supervenience in an obvious way.
Notice that whereas (CP) is not logically required for (CNM), it is crucial to the argument for (CNM). The case against sui generis mental causes, as Papineau tells the story, essentially involves our failure to discover any sui generis forces in chemistry, biology, and, what “clinches the case,” physiology. It is this collection of failures that forms the premise in the inductive argument against sui generis mental forces, and in the absence of these failures it is at best unclear how either (CP) or (CNM) could be inductively supported at all.
The point here is that, for all a list-based characterization of nonism tells us, there may yet be high-level emergent phenomena not ruled out by the characterization if the list of entities characterizing the non is incomplete.
See for example Crook and Gillett (2001).
See Barbara Montero (1999: 184–185) for discussion of this point.
The suspicion is sometimes voiced that neutral monism is really a closet form of phenomenalism or panpsychism, so one might be tempted to think that characterizing the physical as the non-mental would rule it out. Here I just register my view that the suspicion is not justifiable, and direct interested parties to the discussions of those accusations in Lockwood (1981) and Stubenberg (2005, §9).
Daniel Stoljar’s (2001b) proposal is best seen in this light. He concedes that if the version of physicalism he defends is really a closet form of the more “unpalatable” neutral monism, it would “constitute a major reason” to think that he has resolved the mind/body debate “simply by giving up on physicalism” (p. 271). Unfortunately, Stoljar’s response to this charge presupposes the availability of a characterization of the physical that sails through the horns of Hempel’s dilemma (p. 257, notes 9–10), and thus cannot be invoked to ground a distinction between ‘physical’ and ‘neutral’ when such a characterization is just what’s being sought.
Such is more or less the approach taken by Strawson when he asserts that the “Experiential character” of conscious experience “just is” physical. Unfortunately, what he means by this is “something completely different from what some materialists have apparently meant by saying such things,” since the thought that conscious experience “can be described by current physics, or by some nonrevolutionary extension of it...amounts to radical ‘eliminativism’...and is mad” (2003: 50).
Precisely how ‘physical’ is understood by Chalmers is a bit unclear, and post-Hempel it isn’t obvious what is supposed to be grounding Chalmers’ claim. The characterization he provides is one according to which physical properties are “the fundamental properties...invoked by a completed theory of physics” (1996: 33), understood with the proviso that ‘completed physics’ must bear some “recognizable” similarity to current physical theory. As to the suggestion that some radically different sort of physics will ultimately account for consciousness, however, he simply notes that it isn’t “easy to evaluate this claim in the absence of any detailed proposal” (see pp. 118ff. for discussion).
Thus Chalmers expresses sympathy with Russell’s (1927) neutral monism, though he recognizes that the cost of that theory (like that of nonism) “is the postulation of a class of properties that we do not understand” (1996: 298). For further discussion of the compatibility of neutral monism with conceivability arguments and the knowledge argument, see Chalmers (2006) and Alter (2007). One important possible exception may be Kripke’s (1972) modal argument, if the argument is intended to demonstrate that anything identical with a mental kind would have to be essentially (fundamentally) mental; on the other hand, if all it establishes is the weaker conclusion that no mental kind is essentially physical, it is as consistent with neutral monism as the others.
Compare the discussion of future physics in Nagel (1974).
Arguably, even Descartes’ view that physical occurrences are irrelevant to “pure understanding” was constructed in clear view of the character of the physics of his day: “a reason for his dualism,” writes Margaret Wilson, “may be found in his commitment to mechanistic explanation in physics, together with the perfectly creditable belief that human intelligence could never be accounted for on the available mechanistic models” (1978: 183).
For example, Andrew Melnyk’s (1997).
In fact Wilson has more to say (and indeed much of value to say) concerning the characterization of the physical; my present remarks are directed only toward the contention that the inclusion of a no-fundamental-mentality clause is necessary or otherwise helpful.
One might wonder whether Wilson’s additional condition on a thing’s being physical, viz., that it be “treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics” (p. 72) would be sufficient to block protopsychism’s compatibility with physicalism. The answer is that it would not: Chalmers allows that a future “final” or “fundamental” theory might admit protopsychic properties (assuming these are not beyond the ken of empirical inquiry) alongside those we currently count as physical, so as to produce a joint explanation of consciousness (cf. 1996: 126–129). From Wilson’s perspective this would be a paradigm case of a physicalistically “inappropriate extension” of fundamental physics, but the present point is that nothing in the NFM constraint explains why the extension is inappropriate, since the properties in question are not fundamentally mental.
I’m inclined to think this is what Spinoza had in mind when he objected to Descartes on the grounds that the conception of thought involves no other conception of substance at all, and there could therefore be no inconsistency in the idea that both thought and extension are dual aspects of a single (neutral) reality (cf. Spinoza [1677] 1985, Ethics I, note to prop. x.).
Thus a Kantian paralogism against materialism from the unity of consciousness may be extended mutatis mutandis to the panpsychist’s proposal. As also noted by Hasker (1999), the idea that attributing “mental...properties to the ultimate constituents of matter” will make it “possible to explain the mental properties of human beings” looks as suspect as the idea that non-conscious material particles in combination could do the trick, if in either case “a person’s being aware of a complex object cannot consist of parts of the person being aware of parts of the object” (p. 140).
References
Alter, T. (2007). The knowledge argument. In S. Schneider & M. Velmans (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to consciousness. New York: Blackwell.
Bishop, R. C. (2006). The hidden premise in the causal argument for physicalism. Analysis, 66, 44–52.
Chalmers, D. (2006). The two-dimensional argument against materialism. In The character of consciousness. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crane, T., & Mellor, D. H. (1990). There is no question of physicalism. Mind, 99, 185–206.
Crook, S., & Carl, G. (2001). Why physics alone cannot define the ‘physical’: Materialism, metaphysics, and the formulation of physicalism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 31, 333–360.
Driesch, H. (1914). The history and theory of vitalism (C. K. Ogden, trans.) London: Macmillan & Co.
Gillett, C., & Witmer, D. G. (2001). A ‘physical’ need: Physicalism and the Via negativa. Analysis, 61, 302–309.
Hasker, W. (1999). The emergent self. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hempel, C. (1980). Comments on Goodman’s ways of worldmaking. Synthese, 45, 193–199.
Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience: Meeting the demands of a material world. Mind, 102, 555–586.
James, W. ([1890] 1918). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Dover Publication, Inc.
Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or something near enough. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kim, J. (1989). The myth of nonreductive materialism. Reprinted. In J. Kim (Ed.), Supervenience and mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press (1993).
Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lockwood, M. (1981). What was Russell’s neutral monism? Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 4, 143–158.
McGinn, C. (1999). The mysterious flame: Conscious minds in a material world. New York: Perseus Books.
Melnyk, A. (1997). How to keep the ‘physical’ in ‘physicalism’. The Journal of Philosophy, 94, 622–637.
Montero, B. (1999). The body problem. Noûs 33, 183–200.
Montero, B., & Papineau, D. (2005). A defense of the Via Negativa argument for physicalism. Analysis, 65, 233–237.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.
Papineau, D. (2001). The rise of physicalism. In G. Carl & L. Barry (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press.
Papineau, D. (1990). Why supervenience? Analysis, 50, 66–71.
Russell, B. (1927). The analysis of matter. London: Kegan Paul.
Searle, J. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Spinoza, B. ([1677] 1985). Ethics. (E. Curley, trans.), The collected writings of spinoza (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press.
Spurrett, D., & Papineau, D. 1999. A note on the completeness of ‘physics’. Analysis, 59, 25–29.
Strawson, G. (2003). Real materialism. In M. A. Louise & H. Norbert (Eds.), Chomsky and his critics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Stoljar, D. (2001a). Physicalism. Stanford on-line encyclopedia of philosophy.
Stoljar, D. (2001b). Two conceptions of the physical. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, 253–281.
Stubenberg, L. (2005). Neutral monism. Stanford on-line encyclopedia of philosophy.
Welshon, R. (2002). Emergence, supervenience, and realization. Philosophical Studies, 108, 39–51.
Wilson, J. (2006). On characterizing the physical. Philosophical Studies, 131, 61–99.
Wilson, M. D. (1978). Descartes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Judisch, N. Why ‘non-mental’ won’t work: on Hempel’s dilemma and the characterization of the ‘physical’. Philos Stud 140, 299–318 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9142-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9142-8