Abstract
According to the Multiple Realizability Argument, a higher-level property typically has many physical realizers, so it cannot be type-identical to any one of them. This enables the non-reductive physicalist to claim that some higher-level properties are type-distinct from physical properties. The reductive physicalist can counter with the Disjunctive Strategy: nothing prevents us from type-identifying the higher-level property with the disjunction of its realizers. Developing a powers-based ontology of properties, Shoemaker (2001) and Wilson (2011) present responses to the Disjunctive Strategy, wherein higher-level property instances are token-distinct from their realizers, while instances of disjunctions are not. In this paper, I argue that such responses to the Disjunctive Strategy can be reasonably resisted, either by denying token-distinctness, or by insisting that exhaustively overlapping disjunctive properties are also token-distinct from the realizers. This secures the Disjunctive Strategy as a core component of the argument for reductive physicalism.
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Notes
In this paper, I take an expansive view of ontological innocence, so that ontologically innocent combinations of properties include boolean logical combinations (importantly, disjunctions), mathematical combinations (like averages over determinate values), and mereological combinations. Excluding such combinations would trivialize the debate between reductive and non-reductive physicalists, since, for example, reduction to bare spatiotemporal distributions of physical properties, or to superpositions of such properties, would no longer count as sufficiently reductive.
Wilson (2006) gives three examples of how to realization has been characterized in the literature. One option is functionalism, where higher-level properties are characterized by their causal role, and lower-level properties satisfy those roles. See, for example, Putnam (1967), Fodor (1974), or Antony and Levine (1997). Another option is the determinate/determinable relation, so that lower-level properties (the determinates) are a particular way of being higher-level properties (the determinables). See, for example, Yablo (1992) and Wilson (2009). A third option is mereological, with higher-level properties being mereological sums of the-lower level properties. See, for example, Shoemaker (2001) and Paul (2002).
Or the Disjunctive Move. See Jaworski (2002).
Putnam (1967) also anticipates the Disjunctive Strategy, but he merely dismisses it as ad hoc without further argument.
According to Fodor, the exceptions of the special science law are explained by some physical realizers of \(P\) failing to be lawfully connected to any physical realizers of \(Q\). This explanation is unavailable to anyone who type-identifies the special science properties with the disjunctive properties.
Kim finds local reduction “more satisfying” (Kim 1992, p. 24), though he allows for higher-level properties to be type-identical to a heterogeneous disjunction of physical kinds.
Functional specification goes back as far as Lewis (1966) and Armstrong (1968) (see Levin 2013). It contrasts with functional state identity: use causal/functional language to define a property as the second-order property of being some property that satisfies the appropriate causal/functional role. The latter is implicit in, e.g., Fodor (1974).
It is not quite eliminativist, since the special science studying the higher-level property is not orthogonal to the lower-level science; the special science just (perhaps erroneously) unifies phenomena that are not unified in nature.
See, for example, Fodor (1997, p. 154). One might argue that jadeite and nephrite do have things in common not had by any other mineral: the power to induce the utterance ‘jade’ in the appropriate contexts, and the like. However, since any combination of property instances can in principle be given a name, admitting powers of this sort is extremely problematic for any account of properties based on causal powers.
Something like this view goes back at least as far as Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism (Davidson 1970), according to which mental events (constituted by rationalizing explanations) and physical events (constituted by causal closure) cross-categorize the very same events.
In contrast, see Clarke (1999), according to whom higher-level property instances have causal powers beyond those of their realizers on the occasion.
The argument is persuasive, but, it seems to me, not quite sound. In particular, non-reductive physicalists can adopt token physicalism, as long as they deny the physicality of the disjunctive property to which the higher-level property is type-identical.
Indeed, satisfying SCCP may do more for the non-reductive physicalist than preserve physicalism. It also purportedly explains, contra Kim (1998, 2005), how a type-distinct higher-level property does not causally compete with its realizer; since the two share causal power tokens, there is only one causal event on the occasion. See Wilson (2011).
Wilson claims to be following Clarke (1999) when she states that it is possible for a property instance to have fewer causal powers than its type, owing to causal powers being conditional on circumstances (i.e., activation conditions) in which the property is instanced. This appears to me to be a misreading of Clarke. According to the latter, a property instance can never have fewer causal powers than those characteristic of its type. What might have fewer causal powers than those characteristic of a higher-level property type is not the higher-level property instance. Rather, it is the complex that includes both the higher-level property instance and at least some of the background structure that comes along with its realizer on the occasion, and upon which activation conditions of the higher-level property depend.
Rather, types are classes of tropes with exactly resembling natures, where having particular causal powers is part of the nature.
For Valentines Day, I gave my wife a card and flowers. I can take the position that there was only one giving (the giving of the card and flowers). I can take the position that there were two givings (one for each gift given). But I cannot reasonably take the position that there were three givings, the card giving, the flowers giving, and the giving of both. A metaphysics that requires a separate giving for each member of the power set of the set of gifts appears to be in error. So it is with conferring causal powers.
This is one of the lessons of Ney (2010).
Indeed, this is enough for Clarke to make his point. His concern in making the argument is that a property instance cannot have fewer causal powers than its type, to support his position that higher-level property instances have more causal powers than their realizers on the occasion.
Indeed, some trope theorists rely this to distinguish resemblance (a similarity relation) from compresence (an equivalence relation) in order to ground the asymmetry of objects (compresent tropes) and predicates (resembling tropes). See, for example, Mormann (1995).
The relation of having some among a characteristic set of causal powers would be a way for tropes bear a family resemblance. Against this view, see, for example, Campbell (1981, p. 485), who argues that while tropes can resemble without exactly resembling, they cannot resemble by family resemblance.
This is also enough for Clarke to make his point. See footnote 20.
The same point in a very similar context is made by Robb (2013). He argues that inexact resemblance allows for a trope-theoretic account of multiply realized properties, as part of an overall program of casting (type-identity) physicalism in terms of trope theory. See also Robb (1997). In contrast, see Gibb (2004).
For the purposes of precision, here and below I shall talk about disjunctions of predicates and the properties to which they refer. Clapp’s (2001) argument is also presented in terms of predicates.
The modal strength of these statements depends on the domain of properties from which the disjuncts are drawn. If the domain is restricted to physical properties, and if physicalism is true, then the statements are true with at least nomological necessity. The non-reductive physicalist can exploit a modal strength weaker than metaphysical necessity, by claiming that the higher-level property has fundamentally non-physical realizers in physically impossible worlds.
Here is an outline for a response to the objection. The apparent causal proportionality and nomological autonomy of higher-level properties ultimately boil down to the counterfactual stability of higher-level properties with respect to their realizers. The same counterfactual stability applies to exhaustively overlapping disjunctions (corresponding to the higher-level properties) with respect to their disjuncts (corresponding to the realizers). But, in general, any disjunction, even one that corresponds to no higher-level property as understood in the special sciences, is counterfactually stable with respect to its disjuncts, since (in general) there are more ways for a disjunction to be true than any of its disjuncts. So the apparent causal proportionality and nomological autonomy of exhaustively overlapping disjunctions is just a special case of the counterfactual stability of all disjunctions with respect to their disjuncts.
Clarke (1999) makes a strong case that there is such a proscription. See Sect. 4 and footnote 16. Clarke’s argument that a property instance cannot have fewer causal powers than those that characterize its type withstands the argument I give in Sect. 5.1, except for the argument that trope types can be similarity relations. See footnotes 20 and 25, and the surrounding text.
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Dosanjh, R. Token-Distinctness and the Disjunctive Strategy. Erkenn 86, 715–732 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00127-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00127-0