Nonreductive physicalism faces serious problems regarding causal exclusion, causal heterogeneity, and the nature of realization. In this paper I advance solutions to each of those problems. The proposed solutions all depend crucially on embracing modal counterpart theory. Hence, the paper’s thesis: counterpart theory saves nonreductive physicalism. I take as my inspiration the view that mental tokens are constituted by physical tokens in the same way statues are constituted by lumps of clay. I break from other philosophers (...) who have pursued this line, however, in that I hold that constitution is identity. Much of the value of the comparison to statues and lumps is that it calls to mind the resources used to defend constitution-as-identity, most notably that of counterpart theory. Along the way, I discuss the virtues of a trope ontology, modal objections to token identity theories, the prospects of conditional analyses of causal powers, the subset account of realization, and the grounding problem. I also endorse a novel, empirical argument in favor of counterpart theory. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that Kim’s ‚supervenience argument’ is at best inconclusive and so fails to provide an adequate challenge to nonreductive physicalism. I shall argue, first, that Kim’s argument rests on assumptions that the nonreductive physicalist is entitled to regard as question-begging; second, that even if those assumptions are granted, it is not clear that irreducible mental causes fail to␣satisfy them; and, third, that since the argument has the overall structure of a (...) reductio, which of its various premises one performs the reductio on remains open to debate in an interesting way. I shall finally suggest that the issue of reductive vs. nonreductive physicalism is best contested not in the arena of mental causation but in that in which the issues pertaining to theory and property reduction are currently being debated. (shrink)

It has been argued that nonreductive physicalism leads to epiphenominalism about mental properties: the view that mental events cannot cause behavioral effects by virtue of their mental properties. Recently, attempts have been made to develop accounts of causal relevance for irreducible properties to show that mental properties need not be epiphenomenal. In this paper, I primarily discuss the account of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit. I show how it can be developed to meet several obvious objections and to (...) capture our intuitive conception of degrees of causal relevance. However, I argue that the account requires large-scale miraculous coincidence for there to be causally relevant mental properties. I also argue that the same problem arises for two apparently very different accounts of causal relevance. I suggest that this result does not show that these accounts, on appropriate readings, are false. Therefore, I tentatively conclude that we have reason to believe that irreducible mental properties are causally irrelevant. Moreover, given that there is at leastprima facie evidence that mental properties can be causally relevant, my conclusion casts doubt on nonreductive physicalist theories of mental properties. (shrink)

Throughout the 1990s, Jaegwon Kim developed a line of argument that what purport to be nonreductive forms of physicalism are ultimately untenable, since they cannot accommodate the causal efficacy of mental states. We argue that, while the argument needs some tweaking, its basic thrust is sound. In what follows, we lay out our preferred version of the argument and highlight its essential dependence on a causal-powers metaphysic, a dependence that Kim does not acknowledge in his official presentations of (...) the argument. We then discuss two recent physicalist strategies for preserving the causal efficacy of the mental in the face of this sort of challenge, strategies that (ostensibly) endorse a causal powers metaphysics of properties while offering distinctive accounts of the physical realization of mental properties. We argue that neither picture can be satisfactorily worked out, and that seeing why they fail strongly suggests that nonreductive physicalism and a causal powers metaphysic are not compatible, as our original argument contends. Since we also believe that robust realism concerning mental causation should not be abandoned, we take the argument of this paper to strongly motivate an account on which the mental is unrealized by and ontologically emergent from the physical. In a final section, we sketch what an ontologically emergentist account of the mental might look like. (shrink)

Abtract: This article argues that the debate between reductive and nonreductive physicalists is best characterized as a disagreement about which properties are natural. Among other things, natural properties are those that characterize the world completely. All physicalists accept the “completeness of physics,” but this claim contains a subtle ambiguity, which results in two conceptions of natural properties. Reductive physicalists should assert, while nonreductive physicalists should deny, that a single set of low-level physical properties is natural in both of (...) these senses. This way of drawing the distinction succeeds where previous approaches have failed and illuminates why the debate about reductionism is important. (shrink)

An analysis and rebuttal of Jaegwon Kim's reasons for taking nonreductive physicalism to entail the causal irrelevance of mental features to physical phenomena, particularly the behaviour of human bodies.

Nonreductive physicalism is currently one of the most widely held views about the world in general and about the status of the mental in particular. However, the view has recently faced a series of powerful criticisms from, among others, Jaegwon Kim. In several papers, Kim has argued that the nonreductivist's view of the mental is an unstable position, one harboring contradictions that push it either to reductivism or to eliminativism. The problems arise, Kim maintains, when we consider the (...) causal powers that mental properties are held to carry on the nonreductivist's view and the causal transactions into which mental events are said to enter. My aim here is less than that of defending nonreductive physicalism against all of Kim's criticisms. I wish primarily to call into question the claim that nonreductive physicalism is committed to emergentism with respect to the causal powers of the mental. As subsidiary points, I shall offer a limited defense of nonreductivism against two related objections that Kim raises. However, even if my conclusions are correct, problems remain for the nonreductivist's treatment of mental causation. I shall close the paper with a brief discussion of these difficulties. (shrink)

I have argued that a strong kind of physicalism based on the strict implication thesis can consistently reject both eliminativism and reductionism (in any nontrivial sense). This piece defends that position against objections from Andrew Melnyk, who claims that either my formulation doesn't entail physicalism, or it must be interpreted in such a way that the mental is after all reducible to the physical. His alternatives depend on two interesting assumptions. I argue that both are mistaken, thereby, making (...) this kind of nonreductive physicalism clearer and more clearly defensible. (shrink)

Most philosophers of mind nowadays espouse two metaphysical views: Nonreductive Physicalism and the causal efficacy of the mental. Throughout this work I will refer to the conjunction of both claims as the Causal Autonomy of the Mental. Nevertheless, this position is threatened by a number of difficulties which are far more serious than one would imagine given the broad consensus that it has generated during the last decades. This paper purports to offer a careful examination of some of (...) these difficulties and show the considerable efforts that one has to undertake in order to try to overcome them. The difficulties examined will concern only metaphysical problems common to all special science properties but not specific of mental properties. So, in proposing a functionalist version of Nonreductive Physicalism in what follows, I will not attempt to answer to well known objections such as the absent qualia argument and the like. This should not be interpreted as a limitation! in the scope of this work. On the contrary, in dealing with more general objections we will try to evaluate a position which entails (under common assumptions) the Causal Autonomy of the Mental, namely: Nonreductive Physicalism plus the causal efficacy of special science properties. (shrink)

Using the notion of strict implication, Robert Kirk claims to have formulated a version of physicalism which is nonreductive. I argue that, depending on how his notion of strict implication is interpreted, Kirk's formulation either fails to be physicalist or else commits him to reductionism. Either way we do not have nonreductive physicalism. I also suggest that the reductionism to which Kirk is committed, though unfashionable, is unobjectionable.

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higherlevel property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as differencemaking to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

Introduction — Reductive and Nonreductive Physicalism A Short Survey of Six Decades of Philosophical Discussion Including an Attempt to Formulate a Version ...

Closure is the central premise in one of the best arguments for physicalism—the argument from causal overdetermination. According to Closure, at every time at which a physical event has a sufficient cause, it has a sufficient physical cause. This principle is standardly defended by appealing to the fact that it enjoys empirical support from numerous confirming cases (and no disconfirming cases) in physics. However, in recent literature on mental causation, attempts have been made to provide a stronger argument for (...) it. This essay argues that, insofar as these attempts are successful, they actually establish a far stronger closure principle. Worryingly, the acceptance of this stronger principle presents a new problem for the most popular form of physicalism, that of nonreductive physicalism. The problem shall be referred to as the 'Problem of Strong Closure.'. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate how different views about the vertical and horizontal structure of reality affect the debate between reductive and nonreductive physicalism. This debate is commonly assumed to hinge on whether there are high-level, special-science properties that are distinct from low-level physical properties and whether the alleged multiple realizability of high-level properties establishes this. I defend a metaphysical interpretation of nonreductive physicalismin the absence of both of these assumptions. Adopting an independently motivated, discipline-relative account of (...) natural properties and appealing to a phenomenon I call “multiple determinativity,” in which a single physical property simultaneously realizes different kinds of special-science properties, is sufficient to show that some special-science properties are irreducible to physical properties and that nonreductive physicalism is not merely a terminological variant of reductive physicalism. (shrink)

It has been noted in recent literature (e.g., Ross & Spurrett 2004, Kim 2006, McLaughlin 2006 and Cohen 2005) that functionalism can be separated into two varieties: one that emphasizes the role state, the other that emphasizes the realizer state. The former is called “role functionalism” while the latter has been called “realizer functionalism” (Ross & Spurrett 2004, Kim 2006, Cohen 2005) or “filler functionalism” (McLaughlin 2006). The separation between role functionalism and realizer functionalism mars the distinction traditionally made between (...) functionalism and the identity theory, because realizer functionalism can be seen as the synthesis of functionalism and the identity theory. In this paper, I begin with an analysis of the distinction between role and realizer functionalism. I shall further develop realizer functionalism as a viable, or arguably the best, explanatory model for the mind-brain relation. Finally, I will argue that under realizer functionalism, we can give an account of how mind is placed in the material world without at the same time giving up on the autonomy of psychology. The autonomy of psychology is tantamount to the thesis that mental properties are not type-identical with, nor type-reducible to, physical properties of the brain. In the philosophical debate on reductive and nonreductive physicalism, reductivism seems to be gaining the upper hand these days. In the final section of this paper, Ishall sketch my defense of nonreductive physicalism. I believe that the current enthusiasm for reductionism is misguided, and I shall show that under realizer functionalism, reductionism in the sense of reductive explanation, i.e., providing explanation of the psychological in terms of the underlying physical properties, is not a feasible project. (shrink)

Throughout the 1990s, Jaegwon Kim developed a line of argument that what purport to be nonreductive forms of physicalism are ultimately untenable, since they cannot accommodate the causal efficacy of mental states. His argument has received a great deal of discussion, much of it critical. We believe that, while the argument needs some tweaking, its basic thrust is sound. In what follows, we will lay out our preferred version of the argument and highlight its essential dependence on a (...) causal-powers metaphysic, a dependence that Kim does not acknowledge in his official presentations of the argument.i We then discuss two recent physicalist strategies for preserving the causal efficacy of the mental in the face of this sort of challenge, strategies that (ostensibly) endorse a causal powers metaphysics of properties while offering distinctive accounts of the physical realization of mental properties. We argue that neither picture can be satisfactorily worked out, and that seeing why they fail strongly suggests that nonreductive physicalism and a causal powers metaphysic are not compatible, as our original argument contends. Since we also believe that robust realism concerning mental causation should not be abandoned, we take the argument of this paper to strongly motivate an account on which the mental is unrealized by and ontologically emergent from the physical. In a final section, we sketch what an ontologically emergentist account of the mental might look like. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump has recently argued that Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is consistent with a nonreductive physicalist approach to human psychology. Iargue that by examining Aquinas’s account of the subsistence of the rational soul we can see that Thomistic dualism is inconsistent with physicalism of every variety. Specifically, his reliance on the claim that the mind has an operation per se spells trouble for any physicalist interpretation. After offering Stump’s reading of Aquinas and her case for the supposed (...) consistency with nonreductive physicalism, I use Aquinas’s discussion of the mind’s operation per se to argue that the human mind is incapable of being physically realized. To support this general argument, I offer a detailed examination of Stump’s use of two criteria of physicalism drawn from contemporary functional analyses of the mind and argue that both are inconsistent with Aquinas’s theory. (shrink)

This essay examines Nancey Murphy’s commitment to downward causation and develops a critique of that notion based upon the distinction between the causal relevance of a higher-level event and its causal efficacy. I suggest the following: (1) nonreductive physicalism lacks adequate resources upon which to base an assertion of real causal power at the emergent, supervenient level; (2) supervenience’s nonreductive nature ought not obscure the fact that it affirms an ontological determination of higher-level properties by those at (...) the lower level; and (3) the notion of divine self-renunciation, while consonant with Murphy’s claim of supervenient, divine action, is nonetheless problematic. Throughout, I claim that the question of the causal efficacy of a level is logically independent from the assertion of its conceptual or nomological nonreducibility. (shrink)

Most philosophers of mind nowadays espouse two metaphysical views: Nonreductive Physicalism and the causal efficacy of the mental. Nevertheless, this position is threatened by a number of serious difficulties. In this paper, I propose a metaphysical account of functional properties and show how this proposal is able to overcome some of these difficulties, in particular, some recent arguments against the causal efficacy of multiply realized properties. However, in the second part of the paper an objection against this proposal (...) is raised and, after a detailed discussion of it, the conclusion reached is that the prospects for a functionalist nonreductive metaphysics of the mind which affords causal powers to the mental seem certainly dim. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that KimÕs ‘supervenience argumentÕ is at best inconclusive and so fails to provide an adequate challenge to nonreductive physicalism. I shall argue, first, that KimÕs argument rests on assumptions that the nonreductive physicalist is entitled to regard as question-begging; second, that even if those assumptions are granted, it is not clear that irreducible mental causes fail to satisfy them; and, third, that since the argument has the overall structure of (...) a reductio, which of its various premises one performs the reductio on remains open to debate in an interesting way. I shall finally suggest that the issue of reductive vs. nonreductive physicalism is best contested not in the arena of mental causation but in that in which the issues pertaining to theory and property reduction are currently being debated. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump has recently argued that Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is consistent with a nonreductive physicalist approach to human psychology. Iargue that by examining Aquinas’s account of the subsistence of the rational soul we can see that Thomistic dualism is inconsistent with physicalism of every variety. Specifically, his reliance on the claim that the mind has an operation per se spells trouble for any physicalist interpretation. After offering Stump’s reading of Aquinas and her case for the supposed (...) consistency with nonreductive physicalism, I use Aquinas’s discussion of the mind’s operation per se to argue that the human mind is incapable of being physically realized. To support this general argument, I offer a detailed examination of Stump’s use of two criteria of physicalism drawn from contemporary functional analyses of the mind and argue that both are inconsistent with Aquinas’s theory. (shrink)

Knowing only what is empirically knowable can't by itself entail knowledge of what consciousness "is like." But if dualism is to be avoided, the question arises: how can a process be completely empirically unobservable when all of its components are completely observable? The recently emerging theory of self-organization offers resources with which to resolve this problem: Consciousness can be an empirically unobservable process because the emotions motivating attention are experienced only from the perspective of the one whose phenomenal states are (...) executed by the self-organizing processes which themselves constitute the consciousness. I argue that a self-organizing process can differ from the sum of its (empirically observable) substrata because, rather than just being realized by them, it actively rearranges the background conditions under which alternative component causal sequences can realize the self-organizing pattern into the future. (shrink)

Most versions of the knowledge argument say that, since scientists observing my brain wouldn't know what my consciousness "is like," consciousness isn't describable as a physical process. Although this argument unwarrantedly equates the physical with the empirically observable, we can conclude, not that consciousness is nonphysical but that consciousness isn't identical with anything empirically observable. But what kind of mind&endash;body relation would render possible this empirical inaccessibility of consciousness? Even if multiple realizability may allow a distinction between consciousness and its (...) physical substrata, why does this distinction make consciousness empirically unobservable? The reason must be that the emotions motivating attention direction, partly constitutive of phenomenal states, are executed, not undergone by self-organizing processes actively appropriating and replacing needed physical substrata; we feel motivations by generating them. But all consciousness is motivated; visual cortex activation is unconscious of red unless the emotional limbic system and anterior cingulate motivatedly "look for" red. Experiencing entails executing motivations. Experimenters do know what subjects' brain events "are like" ---; but from the standpoint of the experimenter's motivational processes. (shrink)

Some claim that Non- reductive Physicalism is an unstable position, on grounds that NRP either collapses into reductive physicalism, or expands into emergentism of a robust or ‘strong’ variety. I argue that this claim is unfounded, by attention to the notion of a degree of freedom—roughly, an independent parameter needed to characterize an entity as being in a state functionally relevant to its law-governed properties and behavior. I start by distinguishing three relations that may hold between the degrees (...) of freedom needed to characterize certain special science entities, and those needed to characterize their composing physical entities; these correspond to what I call ‘reductions’, ‘restrictions’, and ‘eliminations’ in degrees of freedom. I then argue that eliminations in degrees of freedom, in particular—when strictly fewer degrees of freedom are required to characterize certain special science entities than are required to characterize their composing physical entities—provide a basis for making sense of how certain special science entities can be both physically acceptable and ontologically irreducible to physical entities. (shrink)

This paper considers the extent to which the notion of truthmaking can play a substantive role in defining physicalism. While a truthmaking-based approach to physicalism is prima facie attractive, there is some reason to doubt that truthmaking can do much work when it comes to understanding physicalism, and perhaps austere metaphysical frameworks in general. First, despite promising to dispense with higher-level properties and states, truthmaking appears to make little progress on issues concerning higher-level items and how they (...) are related to how things are physically. Second, it seems that truthmaking-based approaches to physicalism will have a difficult time addressing the status of truthmaking itself without, in effect, appealing to the resources of alternative ways of conceptualizing physicalism. (shrink)

How should thought and consciousness be understood within a view of the world as being through-and-through physical? Many philosophers have proposed non-reductive, levels-based positions, according to which the physical domain is fundamental, while thought and consciousness are higher-level processes, dependent on and determined by physical processes. In this book, Kevin Morris's careful philosophical and historical critique shows that it is very difficult to make good metaphysical sense of this idea - notions like supervenience, physical realization, and grounding all fail to (...) articulate a viable non-reductive, levels-based physicalism. Challenging assumptions about the mind-body problem and providing new perspectives on the debate over physicalism, this accessible and comprehensive book will interest scholars working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Mind and the Causal Exclusion Problem The causal exclusion problem is an objection to nonreductive physicalist models of mental causation. Mental causation occurs when behavioural effects have mental causes: Jennie eats a peach because she wants one; Marvin goes to Harvard because he chose to, etc. Nonreductive physicalists typically supplement adherence to mental causation with … Continue reading Mind and the Causal Exclusion Problem →.

A critical analysis of recent interventionist responses to the causal exclusion problem is presented. It is argued that the response can indeed offer a solution to the problem, but one that is based on renouncing the multiple realizability thesis. The account amounts to the rejection of nonreductive physicalism and would thus be unacceptable to many. It is further shown that if the multiple realizability thesis is brought back in and conjoined with the interventionist notion of causation, inter-level causation (...) is ruled out altogether. (shrink)

According to a prominent line of thought, we can be physicalists, but not reductive physicalists, by holding that mental and other ‘higher-level’ or ‘nonbasic’ properties — properties that are not obviously physical properties — are all physically realized. Spelling this out requires an account of realization, an account of what it is for one property to realize another. And while several accounts of realization have been advanced in recent years,1 my interest here is in the ‘subset view,’ which has often (...) been invoked explicitly in defense of nonreductive physicalist positions.2 The subset view holds that property realization consists in the powers of one property having as a subset the powers of another; .. (shrink)

Two strains of interventionist responses to the causal exclusion argument are reviewed and critically assessed. On the one hand, one can argue that manipulating supervenient mental states is an effective strategy for manipulating the subvenient physical states, and hence should count as genuine causes to the subvenient physical states. But unless the supervenient and subvenient states manifest some difference in their manipulability conditions, there is no reason to treat them as distinct, which in turn goes against the basic assumption of (...) nonreductive physicalism. On the other hand, one can preserve the distinction between the two by introducing asymmetric manipulability conditions that the supervenience thesis entails. But this response can be used to argue that mental causes never have physical effects. However, this argumentation can also be used to show that mental causes can have mental effects. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an influential line of response to the exclusion problem for nonreductive physicalism, one defended with the most subtlety by Karen Bennett. According to this line of thought, a successful nonreductive response to the exclusion problem, a response that allows one to maintain each of the core components of nonreductive physicalism, may consist in showing that the manner in which the effects of mental causes also have distinct and sufficient physical causes is (...) disanalogous to other types of cases in which an effect may have distinct sufficient causes. After laying out the formulation of the problem that Bennett endorses, along with her response to the problem, I offer an initial critique of this response insofar as it is couched in terms of her preferred formulation. I then present a general critique of disanalogy-style responses to the exclusion problem. I argue that extant implementations of this strategy are at best underdeveloped, and suggest that lack of clarity in the use of “overdetermination” may function to mask the shortcomings of this strategy. While others have questioned the details of such responses, the worries that I raise concern the very logic of the exclusion problem and how such responses fit into this logic. (shrink)

This paper identifies and critiques a theory of mental causation defended by some proponents of nonredutive physicalism that I call “intralevelism.” Intralevelist theories differ in their details. On all versions, the causal outcome of the manifestation of physical properties is physical and the causal outcome of the manifestation of mental properties is mental. Thus, mental causation on this view is intralevel mental to mental causation. This characterization of mental causation as intralevel is taken to insulate nonreductive physicalism (...) from some objections to nonreductive physicalism, including versions of the exclusion argument. This paper examines some features of three recent versions of intralevelism defended by John Gibbons, Markus Schlosser, and Amie Thomasson. This paper shows that the distinctive problems faced by these three representative versions of intralevelism suggest that the intralevelist strategy does not provide a viable solution to the exclusion problem. (shrink)