John Dupré and Alex Rosenberg: Reductionism & Non-Reductionist Physicalism

source: Philosophical Overdose    2013年3月29日
John Dupré and Alex Rosenberg discuss physicalist reductionism & anti-reductionism. According to physicalism (materialism), nothing which exists is non-physical, immaterial, spiritual, or otherwise incorporeal. According to reductionism, all facts can be captured by some purely physical description of the world. So are mental properties reducible to physical properties in this sense? Are psychology and the other social sciences reducible to biology and physics? In this debate, Dupré defends the more orthodox view, while Rosenberg defends the less popular view: physicalist reductionism. They also discuss some of the issues for both views. Reductionism faces, for instance, the problem of multiple realizability (i.e. how the very same mental states could occur in organisms which have very different physical constitutions). And non-reductionism faces the problem of causal exclusion or overdetermination (i.e. how mental states could play any explanatory or causal role given that the universe is causally closed and everything is entirely caused by physical causes).
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