A Physicalistic Ontology

Abstract

AbstractThe ontology of physicalism says that all that really exist are physical. Then, three major ontological questions remain. (1) Is ‘physical’ referring to those recognized by our current physics or whatever recognized by a future, ideal physics theory? (2) Assuming that the physical are those recognized by our current physics, what exactly are they? (3) What are mental properties and how are they related to the physical? This chapter will try to answer these questions. I will argue that we should use ‘physical’ to mean whatever recognized by our current physics. I will reject the traditional object-property ontological framework and propose a new ontological framework with physical systems as the only existent entities. Most properties in the traditional framework will be treated as fictions, similar to abstract mathematical entities treated in Chap. 5. This answers the question (2) above. It also implies that alleged multiply realizable mental properties are fictions. Further, I will use the ontology of physical systems to give an account of the semantics of mental predicates and discuss several different senses in which the mental is reducible or irreducible to the physical. These will answer the question (3) above.KeywordsOntologyObjectPropertyReducibilityMultiple realizabilityHempel’s dilemma