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Thoughts on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization

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Abstract

This paper discusses in broad terms the metaphysical projects of Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization. Specifically, I examine the effectiveness of Shoemaker’s novel “subset” account of realization for defusing the problem of mental causation, and compare the “subset” account with the standard “second-order” account. Finally, I discuss the physicalist status of the metaphysical worldview presented in Shoemaker’s important new contribution to philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

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Notes

  1. For example, Leibniz used the Latin “supervenire” in a sense that seems quite close to the current sense. For more details, see Kim (1990).

  2. Parenthetical numerals in the text refer to pages in Shoemaker (2007).

  3. The quotation (with added emphasis) is from the reprinted version of the article in Putnam (1975b, p. 371; with added emphasis).

  4. That is, until quite recently. See works by Lawrence Shapiro, John Bickle, Ronald Endicott, Carl Gillett, Lenny Clapp, Tom Polger, and others. There has been more discussion of the question how widespread the phenomenon of multiple realization is. See, e.g., Bechtel and Mundale (1999).

  5. In Putnam’s “Minds and Machines” (Putnam 1975b, p. 377), we see the following displayed sentence: “Pain is identical with stimulation of C-fibers” (original italics). Perhaps this identity is not a neurological fiction that it is often made out to be; Christopher Hill argues, in Hill (2009), for the view that pains are bodily disturbances. Even so, I suppose we should include Aδ-fibers along with C-fibers.

  6. As has McLaughlin in McLaughlin (2007).

  7. Reprinted in Putnam (1975a). Although it seems proper to call this the “standard” view, it didn’t take hold till the late 1990s. See the following rather belabored characterization of realization by LePore and Loewer (1989): “The usual conception is that e’s being P realizes e’s being F iff e is P and there is a strong connection of some sort between P and F. We propose to understand this connection as a necessary connection which is explanatory. The existence of an explanatory connection between two properties is stronger than the claim that P → F is physically necessary since not every physically necessary connection is explanatory”.

  8. I believe my simplified version more closely resembles the earlier statement of the subset view in Shoemaker’s work (2001).

  9. Let us now worry here about the point that the motion of the hand often occurs before the pain is consciously felt.

  10. Shoemaker says that for his purposes in the book, all he assumes is that properties are individuated by their causal profiles in worlds that share the prevailing laws of the actual world. Perhaps this suffices to give us (4) from (3)—at least, in this world. Elsewhere, he also says this: “The realizer of a property instantiation should be metaphysically sufficient for the occurrence of that property instantiation” (p. 6). In his review of Physical Realization in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review (McLaughlin 2009), Brian McLaughlin argues that Shoemaker’s principal views in the book commit him to the full causal theory of properties.

  11. I have argued elsewhere that we have to accept either epiphenomenalism for mental properties or else their reducibility to physical properties. My reading of Shoemaker is that he escapes epiphenomenalism by taking the reductionist route.

References

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Amy Kind for organizing the Shoemaker symposium at the Vancouver APA meeting and providing the participants with support and encouragement.

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Correspondence to Jaegwon Kim.

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Kim, J. Thoughts on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization . Philos Stud 148, 101–112 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9503-6

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