The content of this paper contains four parts. (1) First, physicalism gives the enlightenments to behaviorism: mind-body identity, objectivity like physics and completeness of reduction. (2) Secondly, there are difficulties which behaviorist could not overcome—both the reduction of the theory and the terms are unreliable, and the strict distinction between introspective method and inter-subject...

Brian Loar believes he has refuted all those antiphysicalist arguments that take as their point of departure observations about what is or isn’t conceivable. I argue that there remains an important, popular and plausible-looking form of conceivability argument that Loar has entirely overlooked. Though he may not have realized it, Saul Kripke presents, or comes close to presenting, two fundament...

Philosophical accounts of emergence have been explicated in terms of logical relationships between statements (derivation) or static properties (function and realization). Jaegwon Kim is a modern proponent. A property is emergent if it is not explainable by (or reducible to) the properties of lower level components. This approach, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence ...

Physicalism is an ontological doctrine according to which everything in the world is physical in the last instance. This is usually interpreted as a claim that every non-physical, most notably every mental property can either be reduced to some physical property or shown to supervene on it. The main obstacle in an attempt to formulate physicalism properly is Hempel’s dilemma, and the most promi...

We should not accept standard anti-emergentist arguments that rest on assuming the correctness of physicalism. Standard strategies that are intended to block the possibility of emergent properties come at a high cost. This paper argues that they rule out a range of ways that the world could be that are, at least prima facie, scientifically acceptable prior to scientific inquiry. The paper is in...

THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY HOW TO KEEP THE 'PHYSICAL' IN PHYSI(:ALISM* Physicalism is roughly the thesis (1) that every entity is either itself a physical entity or is exhaustively composed, ultimately, of physical entities, and (2) that every property is either itself a physical property or is realized, ultimately, by physical properties.l Never mind whether exhaustive composition and realizatio...

An adequate ontology of color must face the empirical facts about perceptual variation. In this paper I begin by reviewing a range of data about perceptual variation, and showing how they tell against color physicalism and motivate color relationalism. Next I consider a series of objections to the argument from perceptual variation, and argue that they are unpersuasive. My conclusion will be th...