Abstract

Naturalism with respect to some realm is the view that everything that exists in that realm, and all those events that take place in it, are empirically accessible features of the world. Sometimes naturalism is taken to imply that some realm can be in principle understood by appeal to the laws and theories of the natural sciences, but one must be careful here since naturalism does not by itself imply anything about reduction. Historically, ‘natural’ contrasts with ‘supernatural’, but in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind where debate centres around the possibility of explaining mental phenomena as part of the natural order, it is the non‐natural rather than the supernatural that is the contrasting notion. The naturalist holds that they can be so explained, whilst the opponent of naturalism thinks otherwise, though it is not intended that opposition to naturalism commits one to anything supernatural.