The Myth of Supervenient Microphysicalism

Abstract

In this paper I focus on the analysis of the concept of the physical and its implications for the formulation of physicalism. Most of the paper is “negative,” insofar as it intends to show why the most accepted formulation of physicalism, the theory of the supervenience or complete determination of the empirical phenomena by the microphysical characteristics, has deep empirical and conceptual deficiencies: on one hand, it seems to be incompatible with the results of different sciences and, on the other, it allows us to understand neither the scientific nor the daily use of the notion of the physical. If this is the case, then we have strong reasons for constructing a non-reductive concept of physicalism that describes a world wherein some of its fundamental phenomena can be essentially macrophysical, i.e., physical phenomena which cannot be reduced to, nor understood purely in terms of the properties of their microphysical components.