Abstract
Nowadays, physicalism is arguably the received view on the nature of mental states. Among the arguments that have been provided in its favour, the inductive one seems to play a pivotal role in the debate. Leveraging the past success of materialistic science, the physicalist argues that a materialistic account of consciousness will eventually be provided, hence that physicalism is true. This article aims at evaluating whether this strategy can provide support for physicalism. According to the standard objection raised against the inductive line of reasoning, the argument would beg the question by assuming some sort of metaphysical uniformity between consciousness and the rest of the natural domain. Here, I concede that there is a way to avoid this criticism. However, I argue that the argument still fails to support physicalism due to a structural problem of justification transmission.
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Notes
Even if I will not systematically make it explicit, I will always refer to physicalism about consciousness, without considering more comprehensive formulations of physicalism.
Note that I am taking into account the standard understanding of physicalism as a metaphysical thesis concerning the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the physical domain. However, it is noteworthy that a minority of authors opt for a different approach. Among others, one can think about Ney (2008a), taking physicalism to be an attitude, and Dove and Elpidorou (2018), who understand physicalism as a research program. In this article, I will not consider such non-metaphysical versions of physicalism. Unlike metaphysical formulations, they cannot be true or false, and the arguments I will take into account here are supposed to provide justification for believing that physicalism is true.
True, some common denominators seem to be identifiable. In particular, the supervenience of the mental on the physical is typically taken to be physicalism’s minimal commitment (Lewis 1983; see also Jackson 1998; Witmer 2001). However, it is not clear whether supervenience could also be sufficient for physicalism (see Horgan 1993; Wilson 2005), and some authors have explicitly argued against the appeal to supervenience (Montero & Brown 2018; Montero 2013).
For space reasons, I am overlooking the problem of providing a definition of “physical” (see Ney 2008b for an overview). In what follows, I will use “physical” and “material” interchangeably.
The results of the latest PhilPapers survey (https://survey2020.philpeople.org), carried out in the autumn of 2020 and published in November 2021, provide a clear picture of the current situation. 51.9% of the participants – chosen among English-speaking academic philosophers from all over the world – leaned towards physicalism, 32.1% towards anti-physicalism, and 15.9% opted for “other”. See also Bourget & Chalmers (2014) for a discussion of the previous survey, conducted in 2009, in which 56.5% of the participants had opted for “physicalism”, 27.1% for “non-physicalism”, and 16.4% for “other”.
In particular, I have in mind Dennett (1991), arguing that dualism makes consciousness inaccessible to science. This, in Dennett’s view, is the “most disqualifying feature” of dualistic proposals, and for this reason they should be “avoided at all costs” (p. 37).
According to Chalmers’s (2000, p. 31) standard definition, a neural correlate of consciousness is “a minimal neural system N such that there is a mapping from states of N to states of consciousness, where a given state of N is sufficient, under conditions C, for the corresponding state of consciousness.” See Koch et al. (2016) for a review.
I cannot afford to address the issue here, but it has been convincingly argued that the mind–body problem is strongly underdetermined by empirical evidence (Kriegel 2020). That is, there are principled reasons to think that empirical evidence will never be decisive in solving the problem.
I take this claim to be equivalent to the nothing-over-and-above one.
Oppenheim and Putnam (1958) famously referred to a history of successful intertheoretic reductions, but there are more neutral ways to formulate this idea.
See Chalmers (2006), arguing that consciousness is the only natural phenomenon that is strongly emergent from its physical base. Note that the dualist’s contention concerning the special metaphysical status of consciousness is motivated by the fact that there seem to be reasons for believing that the mind does indeed constitute an exception (see Tomasetta 2015). Just think about intentionality and the phenomenal character of consciousness, that have no analogue in the rest of the natural domain and keep on resisting attempts of naturalization. Although such considerations do not automatically translate in a non-physicalist metaphysics, they arguably show that the no-difference premise should not be regarded as an innocent one.
In fact, one could leverage Husserlian considerations concerning the development of modern and contemporary physical sciences, and argue that these sciences have been so successful precisely because of the Galilean move of excluding consciousness from the domain of scientifically tractable phenomena. As Tomasetta (2015, p. 93) puts it, what the physicalist is suggesting when putting the study of consciousness on a continuum with other scientific endeavours is that “an inquiry that programmatically overlooks phenomenal qualities will give us a complete account of the mental realm in which these qualities dwell”. For a development of this line of reasoning, see also Goff (2017, 2019).
For the record, Churchland argues that this argument provides support for the identity theory. However, I see no reason why the same line of reasoning could not be used to argue in favour of non-reductive versions of physicalism.
Borrowing Chalmers’s terminology, accounting for such phenomena represents an “easy problem” for cognitive science. In order to explain them, “it suffices to specify an appropriate neural or computational mechanism” (2010, p. 14).
Admittedly, this makes little sense if one takes our mental life to coincide with our conscious one. Here, by “mental,” I loosely refer to all those phenomena that are studied by psychological sciences, ranging from cognitive and affective ones to consciousness.
Interestingly, the converse implication is more dubious. Among other things, physicalism could be true and yet we could be unable to provide a materialistic account of consciousness due to some cognitive limitations (McGinn 1989).
In Wright’s (2002, p. 345) words, “a warrant, w, for a belief, A, cannot transmit to any of its consequences, B, if — in context — one would need an entitlement (earned or standing) to B in order to defend the claim that conditions for the acquisition of w were satisfied.”.
For some respects, a similar point is made by E. J. Lowe, who argued that metaphysics is complementary and somehow “preliminary” to science. In Lowe’s view, the knowledge of possibility that is provided by metaphysics is “an indispensable prerequisite for the acquisition of any empirical knowledge of actuality” (2011, p. 100). What I am arguing here is way more modest. All I am concerned with is that, in order to be justified in believing that an event e will happen, one has to be in the position to presuppose that e is possible.
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Zanotti, G. Consciousness, Neuroscience, and Physicalism: Pessimism About Optimistic Induction. Acta Anal 38, 283–297 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-022-00512-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-022-00512-5