Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
People often complain that it is not easy to formulate a precise and worthwhile physicalism—and this failure is important to the fruitfulness of debates in the philosophy of mind. Hmmm.
I suspect that we can articulate physicalist theses that are intuitively worthwhile and sufficient for most philosophical discussion despite the fact that they are consistent with some forms of dualism. We can get a worthwhile physicalist thesis without saying anything interesting about “physical”, current physics, future physics, or ideal physics.
Like I said, some philosophers worry that no one has constructed a physicalist thesis that is philosophically useful, accords with the bulk of our core physicalist intuitions, and is neither trivially true nor trivially false.
This is old news. It’s also old news that the task doesn’t cause many sleepless nights for philosophers concerned with physicalism. Although they admit that the formulation task is serious, they don’t feel paralyzed by it but continue to debate physicalism more or less as usual. Some think this complacency is a bad thing:
There is little use in arguing about whether the mind is physical, or whether mental properties are physical properties…unless we have at least some understanding of what it means to be physical (Montero 1999; cf. her 2001).
No debate between physicalism and dualism can even be set up. …(P)rogrammes which seek to show that a certain specified range of properties supervene on physical properties are not well-defined. Therefore, since the subject-matter of these debates are not well-defined, the debates themselves and the different positions involved in them lose whatever philosophical importance they were previously thought to enjoy (Daly 1998).
[The doctrine] that all mental entities, properties, relations, and facts are all really physical…lacks a clear and credible definition, and…in no non-vacuous interpretation is it true. …[O]ur arguments entail that there is no divide between the mental and the non-mental sufficient even to set physicalism up as a serious question, let alone as a serious answer to it (Crane and Mellor 1990).
Noam Chomsky (2000), Carl Gillett and D. Gene Witmer (2001), and others have expressed the same or a similar sentiment.
I suspect they’re all wrong.
I think thorny issues regarding “physical” just aren’t terribly relevant to philosophy of mind concerns—even in the philosophy of mind debates over physicalism.
One often reads philosophers who explicitly argue otherwise, but there always is a gap in their arguments. They start from something akin to these:
The physicalism issue is far from precise and plausible
No version of physicalism is both non-trivial and truth-valued
I admit those claims might be true, depending on what your goals are. But then they pivot to this:
Disputes about physicalism are to that extent seriously defective
I think that’s false and doesn’t follow. I argue that those disputes do not, odd as it may seem, require any precise formulation of physicalism, despite the ubiquitous use of “physical.”
Three tasks:
Formulation Task: the task of coming up with a thesis that is philosophically worthwhile and accords with the bulk of our core physicalist intuitions.
Ambiguity Task: the task of coming up a precise understanding of “physical” for the Formulation Task.
Importance Task: the task of articulating a physicalist thesis that is “philosophically important”, in a sense tied to philosophical practice that I’ll describe below.
The philosophers quoted above can be usefully thought of as making the following claim: to complete the Importance Task we must complete the Ambiguity and Formulation Tasks. My hunch is that they are wrong. I will articulate a physicalist thesis that doesn’t complete either the Ambiguity or Formulation Tasks and yet does complete the Importance Task.
My physicalist says that the entities that are targets of reasonable anti-physicalist arguments, are made of molecular entities, and “molecular” is not unacceptably obscure even if “physical” is. There are many things that aren’t made of molecular entities, such as atoms, so we can’t say “Everything is molecular”. But that doesn’t prevent the physicalist from saying “All the supposedly non-physical mental particulars philosophers are concerned with are made of molecular particulars.” The candidates for non-physical particulars are such that if they are physical at all, they are made of ordinary molecular things in our bodies (and if they’re molecular, then they are physical).
Particular Molecularism:
(i) Every human mental token particular is composed of just molecular entities (such entities being state, event, process, and substance particulars that have properties from molecular theory).
(ii) Those mental tokens are composed of molecular entities not appreciably different, in their molecular properties and relations, from the molecular entities one finds in human hearts, livers, and stomachs.
(iii) By “composed of molecular entities” I mean they are composed of them in the same way that our digestive processes and events are molecularly composed.
Science texts can be used to make a list of molecular properties.
We can generate additional physicalist theses, such as focusing on atoms instead of molecules. Or, our physicalist can say that all our mental tokens are composed of molecular entities made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other kinds of atomic entities.
One might object that molecular theory is incomplete, it’s partially mistaken, and I have left obscure the notion of a molecular property. But the incompleteness or partially mistaken status of molecular theory does not make the claim “Trees are made of molecules” trivially true, truth-valueless, or trivially false. The same holds for Particular Molecularism. And we don’t care about weird, undiscovered molecules or molecular properties. We are interested in the familiar molecules, with familiar molecular properties, in our bodies: the ones composed of carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, etc.
One might object that the notion of composition is inadequately imprecise. There are deep questions about composition, but that’s separate. When I say that mental events are composed of molecular processes, I am saying the same thing about mental events as we say about our digestive processes. Any ambiguity or vagueness won’t ruin the truth of “Human digestive events and processes are composed of molecular events and processes”.
There is no difficulty in articulating theses that are obviously physicalist even when we don’t know how to define “physical”. “Everything is a molecule” is clearly a physicalist thesis; so is Particular Molecularism. The difference between them is that the latter has a chance at being worthwhile.
Particular Molecularism rules out the existence of human mental particulars that are not molecularly composed. One thing we need from a useful physicalism is a claim that implies that (i) all the (ii) particular things we had (iii) good reason to think non-physical, are really physical. Particular Molecularism does that, satisfying (i)-(iii).
True enough, it doesn’t entail that all particulars are physical. But it does entail the falsehood of the scary dualism: plausible dualism for actual particulars. Part of what makes the physicalist uncomfortable is the fact that there are decent arguments for the conclusion that there are actual particulars that don’t boil down to molecular goings on. That’s what Particular Molecularism rules out.
Tim Crane and D. H. Mellor remarked that “physicalism is a thesis about properties” (1995). I disagree, but never mind that. For some purposes in the philosophy of mind we need a thesis along the lines of “Mental properties are nothing over and above physical properties”.
I think matters are considerably more complicated for properties than particulars. But as a beginning, here is a physicalist thesis for properties akin to Particular Molecularism:
Property Molecularism: Every human mental property is determined by (and not merely supervenes on) molecular properties.
Consider the briefest version of the zombie argument:
It seems possible that I have a physical duplicate who nonetheless has conscious experiences phenomenally different from mine. If so, then the physical facts don’t determine the mental facts. And that means that physicalism is false.
We can get around the obscurity of “physical” by using “molecular” and the argument is just as persuasive and has finessed the Formulation Task and Ambiguity Task with regard to “physical” (complaints about “phenomenal” aren’t my problem).
One thing we need out of a useful philosophy of mind physicalist thesis is a claim that implies that (i) all the (ii) properties we had (iii) good reason to think non-physical, are really fundamentally physical. Property Molecularism helps with that by getting rid of “physical”. Part of what makes the physicalist uncomfortable is the fact that there are non-stupid arguments that there are mental properties (e.g. phenomenal ones) that aren’t determined by straightforward physical properties in our bodies. That’s what Property Molecularism helps with.
Particular Molecularism is consistent with many non-physicalist claims being true, such as “There are ghosts” and “All molecules have magical, non-physical mental properties”. Particular Molecularism’s consistency with them proves that it isn’t a “version of physicalism”, in some sense. Yep.
However, I’m not convinced there is a point to adjusting Particular Molecularism so that it is inconsistent with such anti-physicalist theses.
First, Particular Molecularism remains plausibly true, robustly contentious, well-motivated, philosophically serviceable, and comprehensive enough for most discussion. So we have our philosophically worthwhile physicalist thesis. Second, many anti-physicalist theses are too unclear. For instance, depending on how one fills out “magic” and “ghost”, it might turn out that ghosts and magical things are physical—in something like the way that electricity and light turned out to be physical.
Way back in 1978 J.C.C. Smart argued “that (a) the properties of mind depend on the properties of “ordinary matter” (such as neurons), and (b) that the physics of ordinary matter is complete”. He never formulated any physicalist thesis, and (b) is false. Even so, my proposal can be thought of as a development of his.
I wrote a much longer version of this piece literally 25 years ago but never published it.
Chomsky, Noam 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Crane, Tim and Mellor, D.H. 1990. There is no question of physicalism. Mind 99: 185-206.
Daly, Chris 1998. What are physical properties? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79: 196-217.
Gillett, Carl and Witmer, D. Gene 2001. A ‘physical’ need: physicalism and the via negative. Analysis 61: 302-9.
Montero, Barbara 1999. The body problem. Noûs 33: 183-200.
Montero, Barbara 2001. Post-physicalism. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 61-80.
Smart, J.J.C. 1978. The content of physicalism. Philosophical Quarterly 28: 339-41.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.