Non-reductive Physicalism Research Articles

The Non-reductive Physicalist Understanding of Human Beings: Centered on Nancey Murphy’s Thought

The Non-reductive Physicalist Understanding of Human Beings: Centered on Nancey Murphy’s Thought

Overdetermination, Counterfactuals, and Mental Causation

The overdetermination problem has long been raised as a challenge to nonreductive physicalism. Nonreductive physicalists have, in various ways, tried to resolve the problem through appeal to counterfactuals. This essay does two things. First, it takes up the question whether counterfactuals can yield an appropriate notion of causal redundancy and argues for a negative answer. Second, it examines how this issue bears on the mental causation debate. In particular, it considers the argument that the overdetermination problem simply does not arise on a dependency conception of causation and shows why this idea, though initially appealing, does not address the real problem. As the essay shows, the idea derives its spurious plausibility from the fact that the dependency conception cannot even make sense of our pretheoretic idea of causal redundancy. The essay concludes by briefly discussing a possible picture of mental causation that suggests itself in light of these results. The overdetermination problem has long been raised as a challenge to nonreductive physicalism. The problem is that a nonreductive physicalist view of mind seems to make every case of mental causation a case of overdetermination. Nonreductive physicalists have, in various ways, tried to resolve the problem through appeal to counterfactuals. In this essay, I take up the question whether counterfactuals can yield an appropriate notion of causal redundancy and examine how this issue bears on the mental causation debate. In particular, I'll be discussing whether, or to what extent, the overdetermination problem turns on particular conceptions of causation. The essay falls into two parts. In the first half (sections 1–2), after briefly presenting the overdetermination problem in section 1, I address the question whether counterfactuals can capture the notion of overdetermination and argue in section 2 for a negative answer. First, I consider David Lewis's (1986) and Jonathan Schaffer's (2003) definitions of overdetermination, and possible revisions to them, and show that the conditions they specify are neither necessary nor sufficient for overdetermination. I then argue that counterfactual analyses of overdetermination face the same kinds of problems as counterfactual analyses of causation and show that the source of these problems is that counterfactual analyses of overdetermination—just as those of causation—cannot accommodate the intuitive idea that causation is an intrinsic relation between events. The second half (sections 3–4) explores the implications of these observations for the mental causation problem. In section 3, I first argue that the attempt of Karen Bennett (2003, 2008) and similar attempts to resolve the overdetermination problem by invoking counterfactuals rest on a false premise, and then respond to the argument that the overdetermination problem simply does not arise on a dependency conception of causation (e.g., Burge 1993; Loewer 2002, 2007). I show why this idea, though initially appealing, does not address the real problem. As we will see, the idea derives its spurious plausibility from the fact that the dependency conception cannot make sense of our pretheoretic idea of causal redundancy. This means that the overdetermination problem cannot even be coherently stated on the dependency approach, revealing that counterfactual talk about causation is expressively impoverished. I conclude in section 4 by briefly discussing a possible picture of mental causation that suggests itself in light of these results.

Holy Spirit and Mediation: Towards a Transformational Pneumatology

In modern theology the living connectedness between exalted Son and Spirit of Pentecost in history has been broken, leading to their linearity and to a structure whereby the Spirit seems to ‘take the place’ of the Son. Modern forms of ‘substitutionism’ distort the theological perspective. The ‘non-reductive physicalism’ of contemporary science can return us to an understanding of Trinity in history, based not on the modern binary of transcendence and immanence but the integrated, transformational hermeneutic of scriptural tradition. This is the critical reorientation of theology to the living Christ, in the Holy Spirit, which corrects the substitutionary structure to a mediatory one.

The Natures of Types and Tokens: On the Metaphysical Commitments of Non-Reductive Physicalism

Abstract Non-reductive physicalism has become the dominant view in the philosophy of mind. Some of its metaphysical underpinnings, however, have not been studied in detail yet. The present paper suggests that non-reductive physicalism is committed to a particular view on the connection between the natures of types and the natures of their tokens – thereby defending non-reductive physicalism against an argument recently put forward by Susan Schneider.

Pereboom’s Robust Non-reductive Physicalism

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 supervenience of the mental on the physical; it appeals to two relations that are physicalistically unacceptable; and it rules out certain epistemically possible ways that the world might turn out to be according to current physics. This paper further argues that the difficulties faced by Pereboom’s robust non-reductive physicalism can all be avoided if physicalism is instead formulated by appeal to a carefully-defined relation of realization.

The Entailment Problem and the Subset Account of Property Realization

Proponents of the subset account of property realization commonly make the assumption that the summing of properties entails the summing of their forward-looking causal features. This paper seeks to establish that this assumption is false. Moreover, it aims to demonstrate that without this assumption the fact that the subset account captures an entailment relation—which it must if it is to be of any use to non-reductive physicalism—becomes questionable.

NATURALISM AND HUMANISM

Naturalism is a worldview that rejects supernatural events and affirms that a complete account of reality can be given by entities and processes that occur in the natural world. It has a political, moral and spiritual dimension compatible with the Humanist Manifesto. In this paper, I present a description of naturalism based on recent developments in physics and biology. In my view, naturalism is based on scientific realism and accepts indeterminism as postulated by quantum mechanics. Because I cannot prove that only physical entities populate the world, I embrace methodological rather than ontological naturalism. I believe that complex systems exhibit behaviors such as emergence and chaos that can only be explained by non-reductive physicalism. We do not know the origin of life or the universe but there are many plausible theories under investigation. The theory of evolution is the best explanation we have for the amazing variety and complexity in the living world. It is unclear how brain events cause mind events; I suspect that mind is an emergent property of neural circuits in the brain. Religious beliefs have a socialevolutionary origin; I am an agnostic who rejects positive atheism and agrees that science may be compatible with Deism, pantheism and some liberal religions.

Interventions on causal exclusion

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects.

Occasionalism and non-reductive physicalism: another look at the continuous creation argument

Malebranche’s so-called conservation is continuous creation (CCC) argument has been celebrated as a powerful and persuasive argument for Occasionalism—the claim that only God has and exercises causal powers. In this paper I want to examine the CCC argument for Occasionalism by comparing it to Jaegwon Kim’s so-called Supervenience argument against non-reductive physicalism. Because the arguments have deep similarities it is interesting and fruitful to consider them in tandem. First I argue that both the CCC argument and the Supervenience argument turn on the same general principle, what Kim calls Edward’s Dictum. It is doubtful that Malebranche or Kim succeed in grounding Edward’s Dictum, though Malebranche, I think, has more resources at his disposal to make his case. Even if this worry is waived, however, I argue that the completion of Stage 1 of the Supervenience argument can be used to raise a further worry for the CCC argument that cannot easily be resolved.

Do MacDonald and MacDonald Solve the Problem of Mental Causal Relevance?

Ever since Davidson first articulated and defended anomalous monism, nonreductive physicalists have struggled with the problem of mental causation. Considerations about the causal closure of the physical domain and related principles about exclusion make it very difficult to maintain the distinctness of mental and physical properties while securing a causal role for the former. Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the underlying metaphysics and ontology of the mental causation debate to gain traction on this issue. Cynthia MacDonald and Graham MacDonald have followed suit and argue that the solution to the nonreductivist’s troubles lies in a particular metaphysical view of events. They claim that an appropriately formulated property exemplification account of events resolves the problem and secures the causal relevance of mental properties. I argue that while this approach might get us the causal efficacy of mental events, it does not provide the sought-after causal relevance of mental properties. I show that the reason MacDonald and MacDonald stumble on the problem of causal relevance is—ironically—due to features of their view of events.

Pereboom's Robust Nonreductive Physicalism

Pereboom's Robust Nonreductive Physicalism

Causal Exclusion and Multiple Realizations

A critical analysis of recent interventionist responses to the causal exclusion problem is presented. It is argued that the response can indeed offer a solution to the problem, but one that is based on renouncing the multiple realizability thesis. The account amounts to the rejection of nonreductive physicalism and would thus be unacceptable to many. It is further shown that if the multiple realizability thesis is brought back in and conjoined with the interventionist notion of causation, inter-level causation is ruled out altogether.

Non-Reductive Naturalism and the Vocabulary of Agency

1.In a recent paper Carl Sachs provides a helpful discussion of Richard Rorty's thinking concerning the question of naturalism (Sachs 2009). He distinguishes between two positions that he terms 'non-reductive physicalism' and 'pragmatic naturalism', claiming that Rorty has moved, under pressure from critical remarks by Bjorn Ramberg (2000), from an endorsement of the first to an endorsement of the second. Moreover, the latter is the more cogent position, according to Sachs. The central difference between non-reductive physicalism and pragmatic naturalism is that the latter but not the former sees what Sachs, following Ramberg, calls the vocabulary of agency as having a privileged, transcendental role in relation to other vocabularies, in particular, all descriptive vocabularies, including those of the sciences. In this paper, I will be concerned to raise some doubts about pragmatic naturalism and the reasons Sachs gives for preferring it to non-reductive physicalism; and, further, about whether Rorty or more generally a pragmatist who also wants to be a naturalist really should or needs to subscribe to pragmatic naturalism rather than non-reductive physicalism.Both non-reductive physicalism (NRP) and pragmatic naturalism (PN) reject a reductive naturalist position, according to which a certain scientific vocabulary - often taken to be that of completed physics - provides us with a full, basic account of what is true, or what the 'facts' are. All other vocabularies have to be 'made sense' of in terms of this basis, i.e. they have reduce to it (at least in principle), or else be seen as in some way or other making less than literally true claims. This is something that Rorty has steadfastly opposed through different avenues of thought. One central one (developed in Nonreductive Naturalism in Rorty 1991) has been the Davidsonean line that while there may be just one reality 'out there' consisting of physical particles in motion (or whatever the physicists tell us) there is an indefinite number of mutually incommensurable ways of describing that reality, none of which can non-question-beggingly lay claim to providing the one true description of it. The position is (semantically) non-reductive but also, apparently, naturalistic in that it allows all events can be described in microphysical terms. We might call it 'ontological physicalism'. Rorty's naturalism goes however further than this ontological thesis in that he also claims there are no radical discontinuities between non-human and human cognitive activity, and that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has provided us with a framework for understanding our place in nature alongside that of other organisms (see Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-dualist Account of Interpretation in Rorty 1991). Sachs calls this the continuity thesis. Both NRP and PN seek to uphold both these features of Rorty's naturalism.NRP can be said to stop there, but PN adds a further twist. Whilst both NPN and PN are steadfastly anti-reductive about different vocabularies, they diverge on the further question of whether there is anything especially special about that mode of understanding and explaining of ours which we apply to each others' activities, involving the attribution of beliefs, desires and verbal meanings to explain action: the vocabulary of agency (Ramberg 2000). The vocabulary of agency can be equated with a certain conception of what others have called folk or common sense psychology. For Davidson, common sense psychological explanations answer to constitutive ideals that are quite different from those of natural science, rendering any hope of reduction of the former to the latter forlorn: this is the thesis of the anomalism of the mental (see Davidson's 'Mental events', and other essays collected in his 1980). Initially this thesis operated with a notion of scientific explanation that involved strict laws, but in later work Davidson stressed that psychological explanations are distinctive compared to those of any natural science, 'exact' or otherwise, implying that there is a more significant fault-line between the vocabulary of agency and all scientific vocabularies, on the one hand, than between any two vocabularies within the latter class, on the other (Davidson 1987). …

The Constraint Interpretation of Physical Emergence

I develop a variant of the constraint interpretation of the emergence of purely physical (non-biological) entities, focusing on the principle of the non-derivability of actual physical states from possible physical states (physical laws) alone. While this is a necessary condition for any account of emergence, it is not sufficient, for it becomes trivial if not extended to types of constraint that specifically constitute physical entities, namely, those that individuate and differentiate them. Because physical organizations with these features are in fact interdependent sets of such constraints, and because such constraints on physical laws cannot themselves be derived from physical laws, physical organization is emergent. These two complementary types of constraint are components of a complete non-reductive physicalism, comprising a non-reductive materialism and a non-reductive formalism.

On the Constitutive Property Reply: Commentary on Campbell

For the nonreductive physicalist, behavioural effects have a complete physiological explanation and a distinct psychological explanation. In a series of papers Jaegwon Kim argues that there can be no more than a single complete and independent explanation of any one event, thereby excluding the psychological explanation. For his own part, Kim includes psychological explanations through the use of an extensional model of explanatory individuation. Numerous critics have pointed out the counterintuitive results of this extensional model of explanatory individuation. In a recent article in this journal, Neil Campbell suggests that Kim's property exemplification account of events provides the conceptual resources to dodge this objection. In this article I argue that this appeal to the property exemplification account does not work in the crucial case of mental explanation.

Rendering Interventionism and Non-Reductive Physicalism Compatible

In recent years, the debate on the problem of causal exclusion has seen an ‘interventionist turn’. Numerous non-reductive physicalists (e.g. Shapiro and Sober 2007) have argued that Woodward's (2003) interventionist theory of causation provides a means to empirically establish the existence of non-reducible mental-to-physical causation. By contrast, Baumgartner (2010) has presented an interventionist exclusion argument showing that interventionism is in fact incompatible with non-reductive physicalism. In response, a number of revised versions of interventionism have been suggested that are compatible with non-reductive physicalism. The first part of this paper reconstructs the definitional details of these modified interventionist theories. The second part investigates whether the modification proposed in Woodward (2011) is not only compatible with, but moreover supports non-reductive physicalism. In particular, it is examined whether that newest variant of interventionism allows for empirically resolving the problem of causal exclusion as envisaged by Shapiro, Sober and others.

Reasons and the First-Person: Explanatory Exclusion and Explanatory Pluralism

In two recent papers, Jaegwon Kim offers an account of action explanation that is agent-centered and reasons-based. I argue that, despite his claims to the contrary, Kim’s proposal points the way to a pluralist view of explanation that might resolve the problem of explanatory exclusion and provide a way for nonreductive physicalists to escape the supervenience/exclusion argument.

Do Humans Have Souls? Perspectives from Philosophy, Science, and Religion

This essay seeks to promote a concept of human nature that is usually called nonreductive physicalism, which is at least not ruled out by Scripture, and may in fact be closer to biblical thinking than dualism. The essay then looks to neuroscience to show that it provides useful insights into how and why we behave as we do.

A Defense of Emergence

I defend a physicalistic version of ontological emergence; qualia emerge from the brain, but are physical properties nevertheless. First, I address the following questions: what are the central tenets of physicalistic ontological emergentism; what are the relationships between these tenets; what is the relationship between physicalistic ontological emergentism and non-reductive physicalism; and can there even be a physicalistic version of ontological emergentism? This discussion is merely an attempt to clarify exactly what a physicalistic version of ontological emergentism must claim, and to show that the view is at least coherent. I then defend the view from objections, for example, Kim’s (Philos Stud 95:3–36, 1999) attempt to apply a version of his exclusion argument to ontological emergentism. I conclude by offering a positive argument for the view: given certain empirical evidence concerning the organization of the brain, physicalism might have to endorse ontological emergentism to avoid epiphenomenalism.

Emerging from the causal drain

For over 20 years, Jaegwon Kim’s Causal Exclusion Argument has stood as the major hurdle for non-reductive physicalism. If successful, Kim’s argument would show that the high-level properties posited by non-reductive physicalists must either be identical with lower-level physical properties, or else must be causally inert. The most prominent objection to the Causal Exclusion Argument—the so-called Overdetermination Objection—points out that there are some notions of causation that are left untouched by the argument. If causation is simply counterfactual dependence, for example, then the Causal Exclusion Argument fails. Thus, much of the existing debate turns on the issue of which account of causation is appropriate. In this paper, however, I take a bolder approach and argue that Kim’s preferred version of the Causal Exclusion Argument fails no matter what account one gives of causation. Any notion of causation that is strong enough to support the premises of the argument is too strong to play the role required in the logic of the argument. I also consider a second version of the Causal Exclusion Argument, and suggest that although it may avoid the problems of the first version, it begs the question against a particular form of non-reductive physicalism, namely emergentism.