Materialist Explanations Research Articles

Competing narratives of the Russia–Ukraine war: Why the West hasn't convinced the rest

AbstractThis article examines the narratives surrounding Moscow's full‐scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and beyond. Since the start of the war, Western characterizations of Russia's foreign policy as revanchist and imperialist have been overshadowed by the more successful framing by Russia that its actions were driven by the need to push back on American unipolarity and Western imperialist tendencies. This article examines how the Kremlin's narrative on the war has been embraced by leaders in core BRICS countries, shaping their position vis‐à‐vis Russia and the war. Drawing on theories of strategic narratives, this article highlights how leaders in China, India, Brazil, and South Africa understand the war and create conditions in which Russia can prosecute its war against a neighbor with their support or acquiescence. The paper concludes with policy recommendations and a brief discussion of why theories of strategic narratives have been underappreciated relative to more standard power‐based and materialist explanations of the war's outbreak, scope, and trajectory by scholars of international relations.

Whose idea of socialism? Conflicting conceptions of the family and women’s subordination

This article compares Honneth’s attempt to revise socialist thinking on women’s subordination in the family with feminist work on the topic. Both identify economism as the reason why socialism has historically failed to come up with an adequate account of women’s oppression in the family. However, their attempts to overcome economism proceed in different directions. Feminists overcome economism by expanding and enriching ideas of the economic and value producing activity and applying these reworked categories to women’s reproductive labour. Honneth overcomes economism by suspending materialist explanation and focussing on emancipatory ethical dynamics implicit in the family. In comparison to feminist work, Honneth’s ethicised account of gender and family is as reductive as the economism it aims to surmount. First, his progressive historiography engenders a Whiggish narrative of the steady expansion of women’s social freedom in the family that downplays ambiguous and negative historical developments related to the changing nature of patriarchy. Second, his reified archetype of the family obscures the systemic causes of persistent gendered asymmetries within households. Finally, his Hegelian endorsement of institutionally expressed normativity leads in a reformist political direction and away from the radical, deep-democratic options that socialist feminists deem necessary to counteract women’s subordination.

Post-colonial gaslighting and Greenlandic independence: When ontological insecurity sustains hierarchy

This article proposes the concept of ‘post-colonial gaslighting’ to analyse subtle forms of colonialism and domination in international relations and the persistence of hierarchies in the international system. It asks why Greenland, despite electoral majorities for independence, remains a part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Going beyond existing materialist explanations focusing on lack of economic development, the article deploys the framework of ontological insecurity to show how Danish elites through techniques of gaslighting challenge the post-colonial status of Greenland and prevent agency. The Greenlandic colonial experience is rejected and delegitimised, in turn providing the foundation for blaming Greenlanders for failing to live up to the criteria of statehood. The article thus breaks with widespread assumptions of voluntarism in the literature on non-sovereignty, as well as introducing mechanisms of contestation to the literature on ontological security. The theoretical contribution of the article is the conceptual marriage of the hierarchy and ontological security literatures through the concept of post-colonial gaslighting.

The Value of Literature for Consciousness Research and Ethics

The paper proposes to integrate literary studies in consciousness research to develop a strong ethical and existential dimension in the field. More specifically, it considers the value of fictional narrative for developing concepts of selfhood and personal identity that cohere with the reductionist explanations of human consciousness and self in modern empirical consciousness research. My central claim is that looking to the literary representations of human consciousness and existence that reject or are free from conventional essentialist ideas of self, agency, and anthropocentrism can help 'normalize' the reductionist scientific descriptions of humans and reduce their psychologically and socio-culturally disruptive impact. The paper uses Virginia Woolf's The Waves as an example, showing how the novel's non-anthropocentric and non-essentialist conceptions of self and consciousness overlap with materialist theories in neuroscience and -philosophy but present these in a distinctive narrative framework and poetic terms that bring out the inherent emancipatory potential of the materialist explanation of human existence and offer the reader the possibility of relating to these experientially and emotionally.

Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition by David Richardson

For forty years, Richardson has worked on the British slave trade, producing pioneering documentation of the Bristol slave traders, playing a key role in the collaborative wonder that is the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, and co-founding the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (wise) in Hull. He began analyzing and demonstrating the economic significance of the British slave trade in an era when the received wisdom was that slavery had no role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and the focus of British historians and of the British popular imagination was on abolition, not on the slave trade or slavery per se.Richardson is therefore perfectly placed to provide what British history has long required, a synthesis between two competing explanations for Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807—broadly characterized as a “humanitarian” tradition, as represented by Clarkson, Lecky, Coupland, and Drescher, and as a “materialist” tradition, as initiated by Williams.1 The humanitarian version argued that the abolition in 1807 was the product of a sea change in mentalities, both elite and popular, that reached critical mass in the late 1780s; the materialist version argued that that abolition occurred largely because the old colonial system had become an obstacle to a newly industrializing Britain, which was developing a strong commitment to free trade by necessity. These debates unfolded between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, before getting bogged down in sterile binaries of economics versus morality and of self-interest versus altruism. The 2007 bicentenary of the slave trade’s abolition, when Richardson was Director of wise in Hull, re-ignited earlier debates about the fundamental nature of abolition, stimulating work by a new generation of scholars—notably Brown and Ryden—that raised fresh possibilities and pointed the way toward a potential synthesis, without themselves establishing it.2 Hence the opening for Richardson.The new volume, however, does not deliver fully on its potential. Organized in three sections—”Trade,” “Opinions,” and “Politics”—it proceeds from a brilliant summary of the slave trade to a survey of antislavery ideas in the eighteenth century and then to an account of the Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary campaigns from 1788 to 1807. It thus spans economic, intellectual, cultural, and political history in an unusual way that balances accounts of the slave trade with accounts of abolition. It recognizes that the economic and political structure of Britain in 1807 was different from that of 1707 or 1757, revealing how antislavery was intertwined with urbanization and the emergence of the professional and manufacturing middle class that redistributed political power. It effectively registers the role of Black resistance to the slave trade by both captive and free Africans. But, in the end, its treatment of abolition remains firmly within the humanitarian tradition, viewing abolition as the victory of decent ordinary people over powerful entrenched interests—an uncomplicated early mass movement for social justice and human rights. Moreover, its treatment of individuals reflects an earlier uncritical tradition. In the brief introduction, for example, Richardson characterizes Clarkson as working “tirelessly” for fifty years, overlooking his withdrawal from the struggle in the late 1790s and early 1800s, his marginalization both in 1807 and 1834, and his final demoralizing conflict with Wilberforce’s sons over the roles and responsibilities of the early abolitionists.The book falls short of the much-needed synthesis for three reasons. First, rather than seeking to understand Williams’ scholarship, it oddly rejects it from the outset as “narrow-minded cynicism,” an extraordinary position to adopt in a book published in 2022. Second, given that the book has its origins in lectures given in 2007, it references subsequent works but does not fully absorb them into the argument. Third, the book tends to treat the abolition of the slave trade as the end of the process, leaving only its final three pages to deal with the abolition of slavery itself thirty years later (for which the humanitarian and materialist explanations largely converge). Future scholars will need to build on Richardson’s new book and to draw from his life’s work in order to complete the task at hand.

The Material of Policing: Budgets, Personnel and the United States’ Misdemeanour Arrest Decline

AbstractWhat accounts for the steady decline in misdemeanour arrest rates in the United States following their peak in the mid-1990s? This article links the fluctuation in low-level law enforcement to changes in the budget and staffing resources cities devoted to policing. This materialist explanation contrasts with accounts that emphasize policy changes like the adoption of community policing. Dynamic panel regression analyses of 940 municipalities indicate low-level arrest rates declined most in places that reduced their police expenditure and personnel, net of crime and other controls. The adoption of community policing was unrelated to misdemeanour arrests. Findings suggest lawmakers should consider how increasing police budgets or police force sizes will likely be accompanied by increases in misdemeanour arrests and their attendant harms.

Megalodon

Megalodon

From Red Sea to the Nile: water, power, and politics in Northeast Africa

How do ideational and material constraints explain changes in foreign policy orientation towards shared water resources? Beyond brute materialist explanations or idealist cooperative frameworks, water politics in Northeast Africa is best analysed through an accounting of material and ideational constraints on statecraft. Ethiopia’s contrary foreign policy orientations regarding two key water resources present an exemplary comparative case study in this regard. In the case of access to the Red Sea, Ethiopia adopted a passive foreign policy orientation; in the case of utilising the Nile, Ethiopia exercised an assertive foreign policy against a stronger power, Egypt. In effect, Ethiopia’s decisions to cede Assab Port to Eritrea in 2000, but then to defy Egypt in building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Nile in 2011, illustrate dynamic constraints on statecraft in Northeast Africa. These dynamics are analysed through a constructivist realism framework that accounts for both material and ideational constraints.

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

Razoável quantidade de violência:

Busca-se no presente trabalho uma outra compreensão acerca da problemática do delito e da resposta a mesma, a partir da mesma premissa produzida desde a teoria do etiquetamento de que o crime é uma definição atribuída a determinado ato ou pessoa, assim como a reação social resultante de uma definição/escolha política. Diferentemente da explicação materialista do condicionamento econômico da ordem sociopenal, traz-se nesse trabalho a compreensão culturalista acerca do delito e da reação social – desde a razoável quantidade de crime de Christie, até a ideia de tolerância a violência de Garland. O objetivo desse trabalho é problematizar o encarceramento em massa desde a compreensão social da violência em uma perspectiva cultural e aportar elementos para a compreensão uma mais alargada a partir de outro marco teórico além do marxismo.

The peculiarities of “magic realism” in E. Nekrasova’s novel “Kalechina-Malechina”

The subject of this research is the novel by the contemporary author Evgenia Nekrasova “Kalechina-Malechina”. The novel contains the elements of fantasy and mysticism, which can either have purely rational, materialistic explanation or irrational – surrealistic. Therefore, the composition is viewed through the prism of synthesis of the elements of magical, irrational and familiar everyday reality. Such approach allows attributing the novel to “magic realism”, which is interpreted not as a school or direction, but a literary method used by multiple authors of various national literatures. The key characteristics of the methods as follows: system of the two worlds, binary chronotope, duplicity, and mythological implication. The complex methodological approach includes intertextual analysis and mythopoetic commentary. The conducted analysis allowed determining the peculiarities of structuring artistic world in the novel; principles of creating chronotope and conflicts between individual and the society; principles of narrative structure; and motifs. The novel by E. Nekrasova “Kalechina-Malechina” represents an example of the literary method of magic realism, which manifests on the level of system of the two worlds and development of the chronotope. Narrative structure is built on the synthesis of child’s worldview of the heroine and the author’s vision, which leads to an ambivalent perception of the world. The article provides a detailed overview of the storyline, which main theme is the initiation of the main heroine into the adult life assisted by a magical helper – Kikimora.

Confronting Old Testament Controversies: Pressing Questions about Evolution, Sexuality, History, and Violence

Confronting Old Testament Controversies: Pressing Questions about Evolution, Sexuality, History, and Violence

Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff

A new book by Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, accomplishes a number of notable things. Perhaps foremost, Goff provides an excellent overview of the debate on consciousness for a wide audience with little or no background in philosophy. He guides the reader through the various frameworks that include dualism, physicalism, and panpsychism. Goff’s Galileo’s Error thus provides an excellent introduction for anyone with interest in the growing science of consciousness. However, Goff does promote a particular angle. As a professor of philosophy at Durham University, Goff has followed the arguments of David Chalmers and others that materialistic explanations ultimately fail to explain consciousness. Like Chalmers, Professor Goff believes that in order to find a successful explanation, we will likely choose a direction that takes consciousness as fundamental in some sense. Toward this end, Goff has also become a leading advocate for panpsychism, the view that the ultimate particles that constitute our world have a mental aspect.However, Goff’s book also provides an important contribution regarding the philosophy of science. By examining science’s development at an early stage, especially Galileo’s role, Goff addresses an important aspect to the current debate on consciousness. And attention on the role of philosophy in science is also important, given the recent bashing philosophy has been handed by some scientists. To make progress on consciousness, Goff argues we will likely need to do some hard thinking and reexamine some of our core assumptions. He provides many examples to demonstrate that often what is required is time spent thinking and rethinking the problem, perhaps in contrast to voices who emphasize just getting on with the lab or field work.But what exactly is Galileo’s error, you might be wondering? Most of us recognize that Galileo played a pivotal role in ushering in the scientific revolution through emphasizing testing theories by observation. But as Goff notes, central to Galileo’s contribution was his emphasis on specific characteristics that could be quantified—size, shape, location, and motion. And this meant removing such qualities that we experience directly, such as taste and smell, out of the domain of inquiry. That is, Galileo pragmatically sought to remove inherently subjective matters that could not fit into a quantitative framework. This has brought mixed fruit. Science, as conceived by Galileo, is widely seen as one of the most successful developments in the history of thought. The focus on subjects that could be analyzed mathematically has led to true triumphs in understanding as well as abundant applications that have transformed the physical world.

Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy ed. by Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus, and Kathleen M. Wheeler

Reviewed by: Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy ed. by Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus, and Kathleen M. Wheeler Melvyn New Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy, ed. Klaus Vieweg, James Vigus, and Kathleen M. Wheeler. London: Legenda, 2013. Pp. xiii + 184. $98.95. In his introduction, Vigus attempts to link Sterne to various German theorists of humor, rarely with success. While Jean Paul Richter is perhaps the best of these, Richter writes far more about his own practice than Sterne's, and when Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer are summoned to the philosophical gabfest, one feels Sterne would find it all rather humorous. Given this ponderous introduction, it is disturbing to read in the Textual Note that although the Florida edition of Sterne's Tristram Shandy is the "standard point of [End Page 231] scholarly reference" (not to mention the other six volumes in the Works of Sterne), because some contributors do not have it "standing on a shelf at home or in any office," they were licensed to cite any edition they desired. This scholarly sloppiness is evident on several occasions, most especially in an essay on Sterne's borrowings by Wheeler, a coeditor. "Style and Syntax," by Wolfgang G. Müller, argues that certain stylistic devices produce humorous effects by combining the external dress of language to the inwardness of the author; together they produce a "performance staging the author's self." Parenthesis and digression, dialogue with the reader, aposiopesis, and descriptions of nonverbal activity all contribute to Sterne as a self-presenting "fellow of infinite jest." Müller subjects several long passages to obvious summation, informing us, for example, that when Tristram tells us that "friendship between the two sexes" may subsist "without …," he is "interrupted before he can pronounce the decisive word … referring to sexual intercourse." Why this is "humorous" rather than comic, satiric, parodic, or funny is never explained, except by way of appreciation, as with another long quotation (of Toby's aposiopesis): "This is a delightful play with possibilities of language, an ingenious performance of an extremely language-conscious author." The fundamental question raised by this essay, whether Sterne shares an investment in the egotistical sublime with Romantics like Jean Paul Richter is never answered. Verena Olejniczak Lobsien's "The Ruins of Melancholy in Sterne's Tristram Shandy" is more useful. Tracing the history of melancholy from its classical origins, she notes two interdependent strands of enthusiasm (inspiration) and spleen (despair) that come apart at the end of the seventeenth century (in Montaigne and Burton). This is manifested in Tristram by a preponderance of melancholy as an illness, characterized by materialistic, obsessional, or nationalistic explanations: the self is locked into self-obsession. At the same time, however, Sterne provides clues leading to a Romantic reading, whereby melancholy turns into aspirations toward the infinite and otherness. This is promising, although Lobsien's reading of Tristram is flawed by overstatement and self-confessed prudery. The work is "a blatantly gendered, often downright misogynist, text"; the male characters are "disabled, mutilated (preferably castrated), brought to a standstill" (Trim?). Sterne's heroes are failures, manifesting "scurrilous individuality." Toby is as "traditionally splenetic as his brother," and both are "doomed to fail, repeatedly and disastrously, in their attempts to domesticate and appropriate recalcitrant, incalculable, contingent life." While readers might find this failure humorous, as human efforts appear to God (or to the Infinite, as Richter and Coleridge have it), it is, Lobsien argues, laughter on "questionable grounds. … [T]here is no escaping from the claustrophobic and self-perpetuating immanence of the text." We are far away from the text of Tristram Shandy in many of these remarks; one senses she would prefer a Sterne who wrote more like Richter; some of us are thankful he did not. In "From Personal Identity to Character: Sterne and Hume," Vigus redeems his introduction with a cogent discussion of the philosophically elusive notion of personal identity and the empirical (cause and effect) actualities of character. For Hume, character is best defined in a social setting and hence in narrative; Vigus uses the "Abuses of Conscience" to illustrate his point that Sterne rejects a "simple, memory-based theory of...

To "foil the ingenuity of Pain": Byron's The Lament of Tasso

To "foil the ingenuity of Pain":Byron's The Lament of Tasso Adam White (bio) A number of figures in Byron's poems and plays, from the prisoner of Chillon to Manfred and Marino Faliero, find themselves in states of mental distress. But less remarked upon is the way that several figures in Byron's poems and plays also suffer bodily pain. In this essay I analyze the under-scrutinized subject of pain in The Lament of Tasso. I argue that in dramatizing Tasso's confinement, the poem combines a Stoic emphasis ("our Stoical success" [Lament 103]) on preserving the powers of the "mind" and defying pain with a Christian notion of physical suffering as redemptive. The creative assimilation of certain elements of the Stoic and Christian traditions and their understanding of pain, as I would contend, is a hallmark of Byron's treatment of the subject in The Lament of Tasso and also, to a more limited extent, in The Two Foscari. Byron's attention to bodily, physical pain in The Lament of Tasso also complicates his poetic language of mental sufferance and patience; for example, "bear, borne, and bore" (97, 211). An analysis of pain in The Lament of Tasso, then, allows one to bring Byron's neglected place in the history of writing about pain into clear focus. In order to properly contextualize these arguments, I first provide a brief overview of how Stoic and Christian traditions might apply to Byron, followed by a summary of the dominant critical traditions in thinking on pain. Some analysis of the scenarios of pain in The Two Foscari then follows, before I turn to The Lament of Tasso. Pain in The Lament of Tasso is, as elsewhere in Byron's works, central to shaping an individual consciousness and identity. Byron's poem presents a scenario whereby abstract things such as injustice, scorn, and calumny appear to operate with material or material-like effects. They are generally considered productive of, in particular, bodily types of pain. In the introduction to their collection of essays, Byron's Temperament: Essays in Body and Mind, Bernard Beatty and Jonathon Shears argue that Byron "often settles for materialist explanations of mental/psychic behaviour.… And yet, he was never an out-and-out materialist for, more deeply, he was always some kind of Dualist in that he thought that a double explanation, often specifically self-contradictory, of the same phenomena gave more [End Page 57] insight than a single one" (2). The situation that Byron dramatizes in The Lament of Tasso certainly lends itself to a Stoic interpretation in regard to the idea of enduring pain with dignity, and this would also be the case with Byron's other great narrative of imprisonment, The Prisoner of Chillon. It is Stoicism's emphasis—particularly as represented in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations—on enduring pain with dignity and on the body as a potential barrier to the mind's capacity to achieve its highest potential that I want to emphasize in my reading of The Lament of Tasso. As William James Hoverd, drawing on the work of Judith Perkins's The Suffering Self, points out, "Stoicism regarded the individual as dualistic and was concerned with morality and self-mastery. Pain, material hurt, or loss ultimately did nothing to affect the soul. As a result, any disciplined individual could demonstrate their personal virtue through their reaction to physical adversity" (11). Hoverd outlines how this dualistic view of body and soul influenced early Christianity and its understanding that "the control of pain or suffering of the physical body should be understood as virtuous" (12). Indeed, Frans Willem Korsten, who attends to the root of the word "pain" as meaning "punishment," points out that in Christianity, the infliction of bodily pain is considered to be necessary for the just organization of history: "pain becomes, firstly, not something you have, but something you get in return for, or as a consequence of something. It is, therefore, always related to a history" (377). As we will see later, Byron's Tasso defines his past, present, and future in relation to bodily pain: "I bear and bore / The much I have recounted / and I...

Mercantilism: a materialist approach

ABSTRACTHistorians and economists have shown renewed interest in mercantilism over the last couple of years. From this interest, a dispute has arisen about whether mercantilism should be seen as an incoherent economic thought or if it is possible to ‘reconstruct’ its basic principles. In line with this latter attempt, this paper is intended to provide a materialist explanation for varying degrees of belief in shared mercantilist assumptions. My hypothesis is that belief in mercantilist assumptions is significantly dependent upon how economic and security issues materially interact in a given time and space, with uncertainty and insecurity profoundly favouring mercantilist dispositions in economic thought. To analyse this hypothesis, the paper sets the first steps for relating the credibility of mercantilism with changes in British economic and military history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Section 3 presents ideas to further investigate this hypothesis. Section 4 concludes the paper.

WOBBLY VITALISM: BERGSON, SOREL, AND THE INTERPRETATION OF REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1905–1915

The vogue for the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the popularity of vitalist ideas more generally, periodically claims the attention of historians of early twentieth-century American thought and culture. There is little appreciation, however, for either the broad epistemic significance of these ideas or for their profound ethical and political implications. This essay explores the activity of Bergsonian vitalism, particularly as applied by Bergson's radical compatriot, Georges Sorel, within the fractious conversation that attended the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a significant force in the pre-war 1910s. Understanding the ways in which this seemingly unprecedented menace to the status quo was understood facilitates a rethinking of the relationship between ideas and experience in the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World, and illuminates the attraction of radically empiricist approaches to interpreting social phenomena in the Progressive Era. Here, as elsewhere, Bergsonism challenged dominant materialistic and mechanistic explanations in the name of “life,” a seductive alternative for those alienated by, or suffering under, the juggernaut of urban-industrial modernization.

The Reason of the Order: The Dual Role of Leibniz on Diderot’s Way Out of Finalism

The following article studies the paradoxical influence of Leibniz on Diderot’s materialism. Indeed, by using the principle of identity of indiscernibles, the principle of continuity and the idea that force is inherent to matter. Diderot develops a materialistic explanation of the apparent order of nature that he opposes to the empirical finalism, as well as to metaphysical finalism of “Leibniz, Newton and Clarke”.

Japan's Womenomics Diplomacy: Fighting Stigma and Constructing ODA Leadership on Gender Equality

AbstractUnder conservative Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, Japan has embarked upon a high profile ‘Womenomics’ foreign policy agenda to highlight Japan's official development assistance (ODA) contributions to women's empowerment worldwide. This paper examines the puzzle of why such an avowedly conservative government would pursue a feminist foreign policy agenda. The paper finds that Japan's Womenomics diplomacy cannot be explained simply by materialist or domestic political explanations, but is best understood as a strategic campaign stemming from elite concern about Japan's national identity and esteem about its status in the world. Through Womenomics diplomacy, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs attempts to construct Japan as a leader on women's rights and gender equality in response to the twin stigmas of Japan's treatment of wartime ‘comfort women’ and perennial low rankings on international indexes of gender equality.

Materialist and Causal Bridges Over the Explanatory Gap

I offer that the explanatory gap about consciousness can be bridged by a materialist account that is compatible with the causal closure of the physical world. I suggest that Jaegwon Kim’s argument for causal closure is the best motivation for materialist explanations of consciousness, or the character of subjective experience. I then propose that the best materialist account available to do this explanatory work, that is also compatible with a causal closure condition, is Austen Clark’s feature-placing hypothesis. Feature-placing has it that sensory individuals, or qualitative properties, are picked out by their locations in space around a perceiver, and it accounts for preattentive perceptual processes. Featureplacing is not compatible with functionalism however, which is a solution Kim offers to epiphenomenal theories of consciousness. I hold that despite feature-placing’s problems with functionalism, Clark’s account remains compatible with causal closure because it suggests physical reduction to neural processes, like selective attention mechanisms. I conclude that causal closure, combined with the featureplacing of sensory individuals by the spatial discrimination capacities organisms have can go a far way in bridging the explanatory gap.