Two challenges to the very possibility of emergence are addressed, one metaphysical and one logical. The resolution of the metaphysical challenge requires a shift to a process metaphysics, while the logical challenge highlights normative emergence, and requires a shift to more powerful logical tools -- in particular, that of implicit definition. Within the framework of a process metaphysics, two levels of normative emergence are outlined: that of function and that of representation.

Samuel Alexander was one of the foremost philosophical figures of his day and has been argued by John Passmore to be one of ‘fathers’ of Australian philosophy as well as a novel kind of physicalist. Yet Alexander is now relatively neglected, his role in the genesis of Australian philosophy if far from widely accepted and the standard interpretation takes him to be an anti-physicalist. In this paper, I carefully examine these issues and show that Alexander has been badly, although understandably, (...) misjudged by most of his contemporary critics and interpreters. Most importantly, I show that Alexander offers an ingenious, and highly original, version of physicalism at the heart of which is a strikingly different view of the nature of the microphysical properties and associated view of emergent properties. My final conclusion will be that Passmore is correct in his claims both that Alexander is significant as one of the grandfather’s of Australian philosophy and that he provides a novel physicalist position. I will also suggest that Alexander’s emergentism is important for addressing the so-called ‘problem of mental causation’ presently dogging contemporary non-reductive physicalists. (shrink)

Fodor’s theory of concepts holds that the psychological capacities, beliefs or intentions which determine how we use concepts do not determine reference. Instead, causal relations of a specific kind between properties and our dispositions to token a concept are claimed to do so. Fodor does admit that there needs to be some psychological mechanisms mediating the property–concept tokening relations, but argues that they are purely accidental for reference. In contrast, I argue that the actual mechanisms that sustain the reference determining (...) concept tokening relations are necessary for reference. Fodor’s atomism is thus undermined, since in order to refer with a concept it is necessary to possess some specific psychological capacities. (shrink)

Accounts of mental content rooted in asymmetric dependence hold, crudely speaking, that the content of a mental representation is the cause of that representation on which all its other causes depend.1 To speak somewhat less crudely, such accounts, hereafter.

As is well known, meaningful expressions denoting no actual entity represent a hard problem for any naturalistically inspired theory of meaning which tries to explain the expression's meaning in terms of the expression's cause. For, since the actual extension of one such expression is ex hypothesi empty, there is no actual candidate for the role of the expression's cause one can plausibly appeal to in order to assign it to the expression as its meaning. Faced with this problem, a naturalizer (...) may be immediately tempted to claim that there are no lexically primitive extensionless expressions. Thus, for any expression whose extension is actually empty she can attempt to paraphrase it away along the well-honoured Russellian path. Although reluctantly, in his A Theory of Content (1990) Jerry Fodor has however argued that a naturalizer can resist the above temptation. Fodor indeed provides another naturalized informational theory of meaning for Mentalese expressions based on the notion of asymmetric dependence between causal relations. This theory is also basically a denotational theory of meaning, for according to it a lexically primitive expression means the entity it denotes. On the basis of this theory, he claims that the problem of the lexically primitive extensionless expressions can be solved while letting them run denotationally. In what follows, however, I will try to cast some doubts on Fodor's solution of the lexically primitive extensionless expressions without at the same time falling back in the Russellian trap. If there are lexically primitive expressions whose extension in the actual world is empty, their meaning can be still accounted for in terms which are both denotational and non-naturalistic. Suffice it that one appeals to the weak Meinongianism contained in the thesis that one can directly refer to possible but unactual entities by means of a suitable fixing-reference description. (shrink)