Economics and Other Disciplines by Ricardo F. Crespo

Author:Ricardo F. Crespo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

This position is really extreme. One of its strongest defenders, Paul Churchland, states:

Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.

(Churchland 1981: 67)

Second, there is reductive materialism, also called type physicalism or identity theory, which “holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain” (J. J. C. Smart 2007: 1).3 Tim Crane (1995) describes how identity theorists explain mental causation of physical events by considering the mental identical to the physical: “it is because physicalists want to maintain the causal efficacy of the mental that they identify mental phenomena with phenomena in the brain” (1995: 7). For them, ultimately, all “psychical phenomena” can be physically explained.

Crane is surprised – he uses the term “notable” – by the fact that few physicalists accept the identity theory: they consider it far too strong to be plausible. Thus, they tend to adhere to a third alternative: non-reductive physicalism. It is worth noting that, in the philosophy of mind, “reduction” is understood as an epistemological concept: the mental can be described or explained (or not) in physical terms, independently of its ontologically physical character (which is not questioned by non-reductive physicalists). A well-known and much discussed non-reductionist position is the “multiple realizability” of mental states thesis. It was originally proposed by Hilary Putnam (1975) and it has several versions; one particularly well-known is the “special sciences” argument developed by Jerry Fodor (1974). In Fodor’s opinion, there are other taxonomies, apart from the physical taxonomy, which apply to the same thing (1974: 114). As Jaworski (2016: Chapter 11) explains, the lack of systematic correlations between taxonomies impedes physics from taking over the description and explanation performed by special sciences (like psychology).

“Supervenience” is a concept related with the previous theses. Brian McLaughlin and Karen Bennett (2011) explain: “Non-reductive physicalists think that mental properties supervene with metaphysical necessity upon physical properties.” The idea of supervenience is that if some properties of type A supervene on properties of type B, two things that are exactly alike in their B properties cannot have different A properties. Donald Davidson (1980: 214) states:

[M]ental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect.

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