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Physicalism as an empirical hypothesis

  • S.I.: New Thinking about Scientific Realism
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Abstract

Bas van Fraassen claims that materialism involves false consciousness. The thesis that matter is all that there is, he says, fails to rule out any kinds of theories. The false consciousness consists in taking materialism to be cognitive rather than an existential stance, or attitude, of deference to the current content of science (whatever that content is) in matters of ontology, and a favourable attitude to completeness claims about the content of science at a time. The main argument Van Fraassen provides for saying that materialism is not cognitive is an account according to which materialism has responded, so far, to changes in science by abandoning previous hallmarks of the material (or physical), and accepting new ones instead of by taking materialism to have been refuted. I argue that van Fraassen’s conclusions run far ahead of what his arguments establish. The fact of revision and revolution in the history of science, and the undoubted provisionality and incompleteness of science as we have it, do indeed tell against simply letting current science determine what the physical (or material) is for philosophical purposes. But the alternative to betting on current science need not be unconditional open-endedness. The changes that materialists have accepted so far do not, furthermore, support the false consciousness interpretation. The reason for this is not that materialists will swallow anything, but rather that the changes accepted are consistent with the truth of materialism when appropriately characterized.

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Notes

  1. I say ‘extra-physical’ to emphasise that emergence within physics need not bother the physicalist. See Sect. 2.

  2. The fact that physicalism is commonly presented as a distinct successor to materialism presents me with a modest expository difficulty. In what follows I will take van Fraassen’s claim seriously, and treat ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ as stylistic variants.

  3. What van Fraassen says about materialism specifically in Sects. 11–15 of his (2002) is mostly repetition of Sects. 2.5 and 3 (including 3.1–3.5) of his (1996).

  4. I’m concerned specifically with the empirical content and truth-evaluability of materialism (or physicalism) and so will not pursue van Fraassen’s specific remarks about presumptive materialism, which require materialism to “rule out at least some theories, so that they are not even candidates for scientific exploration”.

  5. Smart does endorse general materialism in his (1963), but his main argumentative focus is sensations.

  6. Debate about the relationship between chemistry and physics continues, including some concerning the plausibility of physicalism about chemistry (e.g. Hendry 1999). Much of this debate focuses on the tenability of specific forms of reduction or emergence, rather than the possible existence of fundamental physical forces.

  7. This list is not definitive. It isn’t difficult to image a debate about whether, say, geology reduced to physics or not. I’ve already argued that the precise population of the list of exclusions is partly a pragmatic matter.

  8. Not all vitalist hypotheses concerned forces—some focused on substances, some on principles and laws. For present purposes these distinctions are relatively insignificant, since the hypotheses were alike in supposing vital determinants of the chances of physical outcomes.

  9. Notice that the finding of vital forces, had it happened, could have extended mechanism (by adding to the range of acknowledged forces) while defeating physicalism (by refuting the minimal completeness of physics). The key issue of the minimal completeness of physics is the scope of physics, not the form of physical theory.

  10. We should be careful here, because some proponents of vital forces thought of themselves as kinds of mechanist. Liebig and Schwann, for example, both rejected the minimal completeness of physics insofar as they hypothesised vital forces that were present in all matter, but only active in special conditions found in living beings. They could perhaps be called ‘pan vitalist mechanists’. See Coleman (1977).

  11. This, incidentally, is the kind of case that Chomsky would need for his also inductively motivated complaint about the elasticity of physical explanation to make physicalism trivial.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at the New thinking about scientific realism conference in Cape Town, August 2014. I thank the audience at my presentation for comments and discussion, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful criticism and suggestions.

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Spurrett, D. Physicalism as an empirical hypothesis. Synthese 194, 3347–3360 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0986-8

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