Physicalism is the idea that everything either is physical or is nothing over and above the physical. For this formulation of physicalism to have determinate content, it should be identified what the “physical” refers to; i.e. the body problem. Some other closely related theses, especially the ones employed in the causal arguments for different versions of physicalism, and more especially the causal closure thesis, are also subject to the body problem. In this paper, I do two things. First, I (...) explore the structure of causal arguments for physicalism that represents a general argument. To do this, the premises and the conclusion of the general argument are given exact formulations. Second, drawing on those premises, especially the causal closure thesis, I propose a naturalistic formulation of the physical that satisfies the requirements any formulation of the physical is expected to fulfill. Following this proposal, we also have a recursive algorithm to recognize the set of all physical events. (shrink)

Causal closure arguments against interactionist dualism are currently popular amongst physicalists. Such an argument appeals to some principles of the causal closure of the physical, together with certain other premises, to conclude that at least some mental events are identical with physical events. However, it is crucial to the success of any such argument that the physical causal closure principle to which it appeals is neither too strong nor too weak by certain standards. In this paper, it (...) is argued that various forms of naturalistic dualism, of an emergentist character, are consistent with the strongest physical causal closure principles that can plausibly be advocated. (shrink)

The present paper discusses different approaches to metaphysics and defends a specific, non-deflationary approach that nevertheless qualifies as scientifically-grounded and, consequently, as acceptable from the naturalistic viewpoint. By critically assessing some recent work on science and metaphysics, we argue that such a sophisticated form of naturalism, which preserves the autonomy of metaphysics as an a priori enterprise yet pays due attention to the indications coming from our best science, is not only workable but recommended.

According to some philosophers, we are “cognitively closed” to the answers to certain problems. McGinn has taken the next step and offered a list of examples: the mind/body problem, the problem of the self and the problem of free will. There are naturalistic, scientific answers to these problems, he argues, but we cannot reach them because of our cognitive limitations. In this paper, we take issue with McGinn's thesis as the most well-developed and systematic one among the so-called “new (...) mysterians”. McGinn aims to establish a strong, representational notion of cognitive closure: a principled inaccessibility of a true theory of certain properties of the world, but he offers arguments that only bear on difficulties with psychologically grasping the correct answers. The latter we label psychological closure. We argue that representational closure does not follow from psychological closure, and that McGinn's case therefore falters. We could very well be able to represent the correct answer to some question, even without being able to grasp that answer psychologically. McGinn's mistake in deriving representational closure from psychological closure rests on a fallacy of equivocation relating to the concept of ‘understanding’. By making this distinction explicit, we hope to improve our thinking about the limits of science in particular and human knowledge in general. (shrink)

In their paper “Should Methodological Naturalists Commit to Metaphysical Naturalism?” Zargar et al. try to show that the correct answer to the question that the title of their paper poses is positive. They argue that methodological naturalism has a metaphysical presupposition, namely causal closure, and an epistemological consequence, namely evidentialism. Causal closure and evidentialism imply metaphysical naturalism. Thus, they conclude, one who believes in methodological naturalism should also endorse causal closure, evidentialism, and metaphysical naturalism as a result. (...) In this paper, I criticize their argument and argue that it is deficient in (at least) two different ways. First, what they consider to be methodological naturalism is in fact a strawman: that is another – more radical – thesis that may be called methodological anti-supernaturalism. Second, and most importantly, even methodological anti-supernaturalism does not in essence need causal closure for its justification. Then, methodological naturalists are not required to adhere to causal closure or metaphysical naturalism. (shrink)

The paper begins by distinguishing between two ways of effecting the dissolution of a philosophical problem: reductive and philosophical. Of these, the former holds out deflationary prospects greater than those of the latter. Attention focuses specifically on McGinn's proposed dissolution of the mind‐body problem. Examination of his argument reveals that his naturalist dissolution involves traditional non‐naturalist constraints, in a way that counts against his deflationary conclusions. At best his treatment constitutes a philosophical, rather than a reductive dissolution. But there is (...) reason to think that it might in fact constitute a mere relocation of what is, essentially, the same problem that it set out to dissolve. (shrink)

Philosophers of science often assume that logically equivalent theories are theoretically equivalent. I argue that two theses, anti-exceptionalism about logic (which says, roughly, that logic is not a priori, that it is revisable, and that it is not special or set apart from other human inquiry) and logical realism (which says, roughly, that differences in logic reflect genuine metaphysical differences in the world), make trouble for both this commitment and the closely related commitment to theories being closed under logical consequence. (...) I provide three arguments. The first two show that anti-exceptionalism about logic provides an epistemic challenge to both the closure and the equivalence claims; the third shows that logical realism provides a metaphysical challenge to both the closure and the equivalence claims. Along the way, I show that there are important methodological upshots for metaphysicians and philosophers of logic. In particular, there are lessons to be drawn about certain conceptions of naturalism as constraining the possibilities for metaphysics and the philosophy of logic. (shrink)

Contemporary science seems to be caught in a strange predicament. On the one hand, it holds a firm and reasonable commitment to a healthy naturalistic methodology, according to which explanations of natural phenomena should never overstep the limits of the natural itself. On the other hand, contemporary science is also inextricably and now inevitably dependent on ever more complex technologies, especially Information and Communication Technologies, which it exploits as well as fosters. Yet such technologies are increasingly “artificialising” or “denaturalising” (...) the world, human experiences and interactions, as well as what qualifies as real. So the search for the ultimate explanation of the natural seems to rely upon, and promote, the development of the artificial, seen here as an instantiation of the non-natural. In this article, I would like to try and find a way out of this apparently strange predicament. I shall argue that the naturalisation of our knowledge of the world is either philosophically trivial, or mistaken. First, I shall distinguish between different kinds of naturalism. Second, I shall remind the reader that the kinds of naturalism that are justified today need to be protected and supported pragmatically, but they are no longer very interesting conceptually. We know how to win the argument. We just have to keep winning it. Whereas the kind of naturalism that is still interesting today is now in need of revision in order to remain acceptable. Such a kind of naturalism may be revised on the basis of a realistic philosophy of information, according to which knowing is a constructive activity, through which we do not merely represent the phenomena we investigate passively, but create more or less correct informational models of them, proactively and interactively. I shall conclude that the natural is in itself artefactual, and that the information revolution is disclosing a tension not between the natural and the non-natural, but a deeper one between a user’s and a producer’s interpretation of knowledge. The outcome is a philosophical view of knowledge and science in the information age that may be called constructionist and a revival of philosophy as a classic, foundationalist enterprise. (shrink)

Many common arguments for physicalism begin with the principle that the cosmos is “causally closed.” But how good are the arguments for causal closure itself? I argue that the deductive, a priori arguments on behalf of causal closure tend to beg the question. The extant inductive arguments fare no better. They commit a sampling error or a non-sequitur, or else offer conclusions that remain compatible with causal openness. In short, we have no good arguments that the physical world (...) is causally closed. (shrink)

Whoever has even a superficial familiarity with recent, and not so recent, philosophical debates knows that in the last few decades philosophy of mind has been dominated by physicalist naturalism, and that philosophers of mind who are willing to seriously consider the possibility that materialism might be false are still quite rare. This being the situation, it is somewhat surprising that in the philosophical literature the pro-materialist conviction often seems to float free of the defence of any specific argument in (...) its favour. Yet, some arguments for physicalism have actually been put forward, and in this paper I examine three: the argument from the success of science, the argument from methodological naturalism, and the argument from the causal closure of the physical. They may not exhaust all that has been said to uphold physicalism in the metaphysics of mind, but they do offer, I think, a fair survey of the sorts of reasons that are given in this kind of discussion. If I am right on this point, and if I am right that the arguments I consider are weak and unconvincing, then the most popular form of naturalism concerning the mind cannot be viewed as being well backed up, contrary to what many of its supporters usually think. (shrink)

Resumen En el marco de la filosofía de la mente, este artículo aborda el problema de la causación mental en el proyecto naturalista biológico de John Searle. A partir de la concepción de la mente como un fenómeno emergente de procesos cerebrales, evalúo las críticas que Jaegwon Kim realiza a la eficacia causal de la consciencia, centrándome en los argumentos de sobredeterminación y violación del principio de clausura físico causal. Luego analizo el debate de la causación mental a partir de (...) los descubrimientos de Benjamin Libet respecto a la existencia de actividad neuronal pre-consciente en la conducta motora voluntaria. Dicha actividad, llamada potencial de preparación, junto a la noción de causación trabajada en neurociencia, avala la eficacia causal de los estados mentales, pero en un sentido distinto al propuesto por Searle.Within the framework of philosophy of mind, this paper addresses the problem of mental causation in John Searle's biological naturalist project. Beginning with the conception of the mind as a phenomenon emerging from cerebral processes, I evaluate the criticisms that Jaegwon Kim makes to the causal efficacy of consciousness, focusing on the arguments of overdetermination and violation of the principle of physical causal closure. Then, I analyze the debate on mental causation from the findings of Benjamin Libet regarding the existence of pre-conscious neural activity in voluntary motor behavior. This activity, called readiness potential, and the notion of causation worked in neuroscience, support the causal efficacy of mental states, but in a different sense from that proposed by Searle. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that methodological naturalism, understood as a thesis about the methodology of science, is metaphysically neutral, and that this in turn guarantees the value-neutrality of science. In this paper we argue that methodological naturalism is underpinned by certain ontological and epistemological assumptions including evidentialism and the causal closure of the physical, adoption of which necessitates commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

It is widely supposed that methodological naturalism, understood as a thesis about the methodology of science, is metaphysically neutral, and that this in turn guarantees the value-neutrality of science. In this paper we argue that methodological naturalism is underpinned by certain ontological and epistemological assumptions including evidentialism and the causal closure of the physical, adoption of which necessitates commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

The present paper analyses the correctness of an argument aiming to show that Aristotelian ontology justifies a better interpretation of the world than naturalistic ontology. The problems connected with this argument can be reduced to three: (1) the assumption of a scientific appoach to the world does not imply the exclusion of subjectivity or intentionality; (2) the assumption of an ontology of substances does not imlpy the exclusion of ontological models deriving from the scientific approach to the world; (3) (...) the assumption of an ontology of substances is linked to the problem of the relation between the objective and the subjective world, involving the negation of causal closure of the objective world. An analysis of these problems will be presented below, together with a hypothesis of solution to the problem of illusoriness of the subjective dimension, in order to justify the confutation of an extreme naturalistic conception such as eliminativism. (shrink)

Some argue for materialism claiming that a physical event cannot have a non-physical cause, or by claiming the 'Principle of Causal Closure' to be true. This I call a 'Sweeping Naturalistic Argument'. This article argues against this. It describes what it would be for a material event to have an immaterial cause.

It seems reasonable to seek a definition of naturalism, yet an accurate general definition proves to be elusive. After considering proposals from Quine, Nagel, and Chalmers, I propose that naturalism as understood by the majority of contemporary naturalists is best defined by the conjunction of mind-body supervenience, an understanding of the physical as mechanistic, and the causal closure of the physical domain. I then argue that naturalism so defined is in principle unable to account for the existence of rationality; (...) it follows that naturalism must be rejected. (shrink)

Can we succeed in giving consciousness a naturalistic explanation, that is, an explanation in “broadly physical terms”? This is the “problem of consciousness” which, along with other aspects of the mind-body problem, is explored by McGinn in a collection of eight independently written but related, sometimes overlapping papers, all but two previously published. The papers span a decade and divergent approaches. The resulting juxtaposition of two contrasting “resolutions” of the problem by the same author invites their comparison.

In The Advancement of Science (1993) Philip Kitcher develops what he calls the 'Compromise Model' of the closure of scientific debates. The model is designed to acknowledge significant elements from 'Rationalist' and 'Antirationalist' accounts of science, without succumbing to the one-sidedness of either. As part of an ambitious naturalistic account of scientific progress, Kitcher's model succeeds to the extent that transitions in the history of science satisfy its several conditions. I critically evaluate the Compromise Model by identifying its (...) crucial assumptions and by attempting to apply the model to a major transition in the history of biology: the rejection of 'naive group selectionism' in the 1960s. I argue that the weaknesses and limitations of Kitcher's model exemplify general problems facing philosophical models of scientific change, and that recognition of these problems supports a more modest vision of the relationship between historical and philosophical accounts of science. (shrink)

If contemporary analytic philosophy can be said to have a philosophical ideology, it undoubtedly is naturalism. Naturalism is often invoked as a motivating ground for many philosophical projects, and “naturalization” programs abound everywhere, in theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, theory of meaning, metaphysics, and ethics. But what is naturalism, and where does it come from? This paper examines the naturalism debate in midtwentieth-century America as a proximate source of contemporary naturalism. Views of philosophers like Roy Wood Sellars, John Dewey, (...) John Herman Randall, Sydney Hook, and Ernest Nagel are cited, and some of the central tenets of naturalism, such as an adherence to “scientific method” as the sole source of knowledge and the causal/ explanatory closure of the natural world, are explored. The paper ends with a brief discussion of how certain naturalistic constraints lead to some of the problems currently debated in metaethics and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The most common definitions of the physical lead to a problem for physicalism. If the physical is the objects of physics, then unique objects of other sciences are not physical and, if the causal closure of the physical is accepted, cannot cause changes in the physical. That means unique objects of chemistry, the Earth sciences, and biology cannot causally affect physical states. But physicalism’s most reliable claim, the nomological dependence of nonphysical entities and properties on the physical, can be (...) accepted by a naturalism that avoids such problems. (shrink)

Naturalism is the label for the thesis that the tools we should use in answering philosophical problems are the methods and findings of the mature sciences—from physics across to biology and increasingly neuroscience. It enables us to rule out answers to philosophical questions that are incompatible with scientific findings. It enables us to rule out epistemological pluralism—that the house of knowledge has many mansions, as well as skepticism about the reach of science. It bids us doubt that there are facts (...) about reality that science cannot grasp. It gives us confidence to assert that by now in the development of science, absence of evidence is prima facie good grounds for evidence of absence: this goes for God, and a great deal else. (shrink)

Naturalized metaphysics aims to establish justified metaphysical claims, where metaphysics is meant to carry its usual significance, while avoiding the traditional methods of metaphysics—a priori reasoning, conceptual analysis, intuitions, and common sense—which naturalized metaphysics argues are not epistemically probative. After offering an explication of what it means to do metaphysics, this paper argues that naturalized metaphysics, at the outset, is hospitable to doing metaphysics. The underdetermination of metaphysics by science, however, changes the picture. Naturalized metaphysics has to break this underdetermination, (...) but the criticism of the traditional methods of metaphysics leaves no resources with which to do so. Naturalized metaphysics must therefore be more restrictive than originally intended to ensure that some metaphysical features avoid underdetermination. In this restrictive naturalized metaphysics, however, metaphysicians are only left the task of surveying the opinions of scientists which, it is argued, does not qualify as doing metaphysics. Thus, to fulfill its promise to save metaphysics, naturalized metaphysics displaces the metaphysician. Furthermore, the attempt to re-employ them via the principle of naturalistic closure is argued to fail. Metaphysicians should therefore not be happier with naturalized metaphysics than they are with the more explicitly eliminative trends in contemporary metametaphysics, such as neo-Carnapian deflationism, despite the promise of naturalized metaphysics, likely to Carnap’s dismay, to deliver justified claims about ultimate reality. (shrink)

Naturalism is neither a consequence nor a presupposition of natural science in a threefold way: the principle of matter, the principle of supervenience and the principle of the causal closure of the world are metaphysical principles. They are true, if naturalism is true. So, if you are a naturalist, you should find reasons for your worldview which are independent from natural science. But it is hard to see how this could work.

Reasoning from a naturalistic perspective, viewing the mind as an evolved biological organ with a particular structure and function, a number of influential philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that science is constrained by human nature. How exactly our genetic constitution constrains scientific representations of the world remains unclear. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it often leads to the unwarranted conclusion that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects or properties of the world. Secondly, it stands in the (...) way of a nuanced account of the relationship between our cognitive and perceptual wiring and scientific theory. In response, I propose a typology or classification of the different kinds of biological constraints and their sources on science. Using Boden’s notion of a conceptual space, I distinguish between constraints relating to the ease with which we can reach representations within our conceptual space and constraints causing possible representations to fall outside of our conceptual space. This last kind of constraints does not entail that some aspects or properties of the world cannot be represented by us – as argued by advocates of ‘cognitive closure’ – merely that some ways of representing the world are inaccessible to us. It relates to what Clark and Rescher have framed as ‘the alien scientist hypothesis’. The purpose of this typology is to provide some much needed clarity and structure to the debate about biological constraints on science. (shrink)

The paper deals with a version of the principle that a belief source can be a knowledge source only if the subject knows that it is reliable. I argue that the principle can be saved from the main objections that motivate its widespread rejection: the claim that it leads to skepticism, the claim that it forces us to accept counterintuitive knowledge ascriptions and the claim that it is incompatible with reliabilist accounts of knowledge. I argue that naturalist epistemologists should reject (...) these claims. I introduce my treatment of the principle by considering the analogous situation posed by the closure principle. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)

Michael Esfeld has recently put forth his ontology of persons, with which he hopes to secure freedom and irreducible personhood as well as scientific realism, all by working with minimal ontological assumptions. I present his view and investigate it, finding it too minimalistic: Esfeld’s featureless matter points do not warrant an emergence of persons from matter, and his claim that persons can create themselves by adopting a normative attitude seems more like a just-so story. Also, Esfeld’s rejection of classical mind-body (...) dualism seems premature. I present as an alternative a modified mind-body dualism which solves the problems of Esfeld’s view and argue that embedding it in a theistic worldview is favorable for any account that seeks to establish irreducible personhood. (shrink)

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the (...) sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. (shrink)

In this paper, we support a continuistic reading of Joseph Margolis' philosophy, defending the claim that in the 1970s, Margolis tackled the issues suggested by the analytic philosophy of art from an original theoretical perspective and through conceptual tools exceeding the analytical framework. Later that perspective turned out to be a radically pragmatist one, in which explicitly tolerant realistic claims and non-reductive naturalism converged with radical historicism and contextualism. We will endorse this thesis by focusing on two important concepts appearing (...) in Margolis' aesthetics essays from the late 1950s to the 1970s: the type-token pair and the notion of cultural emergence. On the one hand, we will emphasise Margolis' indebtedness to Peirce's first formulation of the type-token distinction, involving a strong interdependence between the two elements of the pair, as well as an anti-essentialistic, historicised, and contextualised notion of type. On the other hand, we will delve into Margolis' exploration of the concept of emergence and cultural emergence, involving a genuinely pluralistic view of ontology, as well as a non-reductive, continuistic form of naturalism. Finally, we will connect the criticism of the so-called closure of the physical world with Margolis' anti-autonomistic stance in defining artworks. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

Most agree that mental properties depend in some way on physical properties. While phys- icalists describe this dependence in terms of deterministic synchronic relations like identity or supervenience, some dualists prefer to think of it in terms of indeterministic dynamic relations, like causation. I’m going to develop a third conception of the dependence of the mental on the physical that falls somewhere between the deterministic synchronic dependence relations of the physicalist and the indeterministic diachronic dependence relations advocated by some dualists. (...) I’ll then use this new conception of metaphysical dependence to formulate a novel approach to the mind body problem that (i) posits a necessary, metaphysically robust synchronic dependence of the mental on the physical, (ii) satisfies several of the key motivations of both non-reductive physicalism and naturalistic dualism, (iii) is consistent with both the causal efficacy of the mental and the causal closure of the physical, and (iv) is capable of reconciling determinism about the physical world with indeterminism about the mental world. (shrink)

Resumen En el marco de la filosofía de la mente, este artículo aborda el problema de la causación mental en el proyecto naturalista biológico de John Searle. A partir de la concepción de la mente como un fenómeno emergente de procesos cerebrales, evalúo las críticas que Jaegwon Kim realiza a la eficacia causal de la consciencia, centrándome en los argumentos de sobredeterminación y violación del principio de clausura físico causal. Luego analizo el debate de la causación mental a partir de (...) los descubrimientos de Benjamin Libet respecto a la existencia de actividad neuronal pre-consciente en la conducta motora voluntaria. Dicha actividad, llamada potencial de preparación, junto a la noción de causación trabajada en neurociencia, avala la eficacia causal de los estados mentales, pero en un sentido distinto al propuesto por Searle.Within the framework of philosophy of mind, this paper addresses the problem of mental causation in John Searle's biological naturalist project. Beginning with the conception of the mind as a phenomenon emerging from cerebral processes, I evaluate the criticisms that Jaegwon Kim makes to the causal efficacy of consciousness, focusing on the arguments of overdetermination and violation of the principle of physical causal closure. Then, I analyze the debate on mental causation from the findings of Benjamin Libet regarding the existence of pre-conscious neural activity in voluntary motor behavior. This activity, called readiness potential, and the notion of causation worked in neuroscience, support the causal efficacy of mental states, but in a different sense from that proposed by Searle. (shrink)

This paper examines the problem of genesis of logic in the light of naturalism as a philosophical view about the nature of knowledge and reality. The main difficulty of naturalism as far as applied to logic consists in reconciling genetic empiricism (all cognition starts with experience) and abstract nature of logic. Anti-naturalism (Platonism, for example) maintains than empiricism is not able to explain how logical theorems as a priori assertions are accumulated. To defend naturalism one should note that experiential character (...) of knowledge can be understood phylogenetically or ontogenetically. The former account is more suitable for naturalism and allows us to investigate genesis of logic by glasses of evolutionary theory. This way can be supplemented by an appeal to genetics. Both theories can explain how logical competence, that is ability to use deduction, arose in humans. The author claims that the structure of the genetic coded has some properties that became transformed into logical rule. Some analogies between consequence operation and topological closure are employed in analysis. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have recently been urged by Arthur Fine to collaborate with physicists and with other scientists in constructing scientific theories.2 What I am proposing is a collaboration at the other pole of scientific activity; the pole of experiment.I consider this effort to be part of a tendency within philosophy to naturalize epistemology. The banner of naturalistic epistemology has attracted such men as Quine and Goldman. I consider the effort as one small part of that program which involves (...) not only theoretical integration of at least portions of the two corpuses of knowledge, but the employment of methodologies which are common to them both.The theory of inductive logic today is in stasis. A number of highly ingenious and very sophisticated theories of inference vie for primacy. As in the case of many philosophical theses, no closure seems in sight. (shrink)

In a series of influential articles Jaegwon Kim has developed strong arguments against nonreductive physicalism as a possible solution to the problem of mental causation. One of them is the Supervenience Argument which states that assuming the mental/physical supervenience thesis, the causal closure principle, the exclusion principle with the no-overdetermination requirement and property dualism we obtain the conclusion that mental causation is unintelligible. On the other hand Collin McGinn has argued that a solution to the mind-body problem is forever (...) beyond our reach: we can never understand how the brain produces consciousness and therefore the relation between them must remain mysterious. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Kim's Supervenience Argument corroborates McGinn's pessimistic conclusion (of course, if we do not assume any form of reductive physicalism or epiphenomenalism). Thereby it tries to show that the Supervenience Argument could be treated as a justification of non-constructive naturalism (aka new misterianism): we do not understand mental causation, because we cannot understand how the brain generates consciousness. It also suggest considering possibility that the thesis of causal closure of the physical domain might entail the cognitive closure thesis (the claim that those properties of the brain which are responsible for conscious processes are in principle cognitively closed to us). (shrink)

There are two claims that are central to McGinn’s mysterianism: (1) there is a naturalist and constructive solution of the mind-body problem, and (2) we human beings are incapable in principle of solving the mind-body problem. I believe (1) and (2) are compatible: the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other. However, I will argue that the reasons McGinn presents for thinking that (2) is true are incompatible with the truth of (1), at least on a (...) fairly standard conception of the terms ‘naturalist’ and ‘constructive’, which McGinn himself seems to take for granted. (shrink)

This chapter first discusses what it would be for something to be supernatural. I argue that there are good reasons not to reject supernaturalism. The essay then considers whether there is an interesting connection between atheism and the supernatural. One topic central to this question is that of whether atheistic belief can be rationally tied to the rejection of belief in anything supernatural. I argue that it cannot, because – as we will see – it is highly implausible that the (...) world encompasses no supernatural properties. (shrink)

Unconsciousness might seem to most people a more genuinely problematic state than consciousness, but McGinn's title alludes to a problem posed to Descartes, and thereby bequeathed to philosophy, by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. She wondered how a thinking substance, the soul of a man, could determine his bodily spirits to perform voluntary actions. McGinn is concerned with some more contemporary, less obviously Cartesian variants of this mind-body problem--for example, "How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states?" (...) and "How could the aggregation of millions of insentient neurons generate subjective awareness?". He suggests that such queries about "the psychophysical link" are in fact what Chomsky calls mysteries, that they are fated to elude our understanding. Using an idea of "cognitive closure" derived more from the notion of a closed mind than from that of a closed system or set, McGinn contends that our cognitive equipment is unequal to the task of apprehending a mysterious property, P, that would, if grasped, render the mental-physical link intelligible to us. His confidence that there is such a property seems inspired by a naturalistic belief that there are no miracles which could be presumed to account for consciousness as a magically emergent entity discontinuous with physical reality. (shrink)

Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of (...) closure violation. I focus on two brands of epistemic theory that naturally incorporate closure restrictions. The first type holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant question. The second holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant topic. For each approach, I offer a formalization of a leading theory from the literature and use this formalization to evaluate the theory’s adequacy in terms of a precise set of desiderata. I conclude that neither theory succeeds in meeting these desiderata, casting doubt on the viability of the underlying approaches. Finally, I offer a novel variant of the topic-sensitive approach that fares better. (shrink)