After Physicalism

Introduction: After Physicalism

1 Introduction After Physicalism Benedikt Paul Göcke What am I? Who, if those questions are supposed to be different, am I? Understanding these questions is understanding what philosophy of mind, or rational psychology, as it used to be called, is about. Philosophy of mind is concerned with the one asking the question, not with objects surrounding the one asking the question. It is concerned primarily with subjectivity, not with objectivity. 1. The Vain Agenda of Physicalism—A Programmatic Account Since the middle of the last century, the default answer to the questions of what and who we are has been the physicalist’s objectivist answer: because everything is physical—so it went—we, too, have to be physical.1 Assuming that particulars and properties are the relevant ontological categories, we can state the thesis that everything is physical more precisely in terms of particulars and properties. In terms of particulars, that everything is physical means that every particular is 2  Benedikt Paul Göcke a physical particular, and in terms of properties it means that every exemplified property is physical. Combining the respective claims about particulars and properties, we can say that physicalism is either the thesis that every particular and every property is physical or the thesis that although every particular is physical, not every property is.2 The first thesis is known as reductive physicalism; the second one is the thesis of nonreductive physicalism.3 For reasons well known, reductive physicalism failed. There could not be a coherent account identifying all nonphysical properties with physical properties because, as Lowe rightly points out, “a physical state is, by its very nature, one whose possession by a thing makes some real difference to at least part of the space which that thing occupies . . . , but my consciously thinking of Paris has no­ spatial connotations of this sort whatsoever . . . consequently the­ thesis that mental states ‘just are’ (identical with) physical states is simply unintelligible” (Lowe 2008: 23).4 Nonreductive physicalism is the only other prima facie plausible version of physicalism, but it also failed. The physicalists’ attempts to identify ourselves with our bodies, or parts of our bodies, could not be successful for the (often ignored) dualist reason that what it is to be a body or a brain is not what it is to be you—even if there are relations of dependency or emergence between you and your body.5 The failure of both reductive and nonreductive physicalism, however, does not entail that we should leave physicalism behind forever . There might be overwhelming arguments for physicalism which commit us to its truth, even if that truth were to be beyond understanding .6 But there is no such argument as yet. That there are such arguments is an article of faith held by the physicalist. A recent argument for physicalism is the argument from causal closure, the “canonical argument for physicalism” (Papineau 2002: 17). The fundamental assumption is that physical effects are not systematically causally overdetermined by ontologically distinct causes, and that the physical realm is causally complete (i.e., physical effects have purely physical causal histories). For those who assume the reality of mental causation, these assumptions entail that mental states have to be physical states in order to be able to be causally efficacious at all. Introduction: After Physicalism   3 The argument is unconvincing because its crucial premise, the completeness of physics, is either consistent with dualist accounts of causation or else an arbitrary assumption only physicalists are likely to adopt.7 The completeness of physics is consistent with dualist accounts of mental causation since the dualist can argue that mental causation works in quite a different way from physical causation, and that therefore even if the physical realm were causally closed, there would be room for genuine mental causes. As Lowe suggests, “it could conceivably be the case that, even though [every physical event contains only other physical events in its transitive causal closure], sometimes a non-physical mental event M causes it to be the case that certain physical events, P1, P2, . . . Pn, have a certain physical effect, P” (Lowe 2008: 54). But even on the assumption that the causal closure of the physical realm is not consistent with dualist accounts of causation , the argument does not succeed since, as I have argued elsewhere (Göcke 2008), the causal closure of the physical realm is neither an entailment of science nor a matter of metaphysical necessity . Our world could be one where at least sometimes mental...