The Physical: Empirical, not Metaphysical

Abstract

Intuitively, physicalism is the thesis that there's nothing Ôover and above' the physical. Going beyond this intuitive formulation requires an account of what it is for a property, kind, relation, or object to be a physical one. Here I defend an unfamiliar implementation of the familiar strategy of defining physical properties, etc. as those posited by the complete and ideal physical theory. That implementation ties being a physical theory to being a theory with the hallmarks of scientific theories and then identifies physical theories among the scientific ones by their characteristic subject matter, roughly, the world's relatively fundamental elements. I then argue that, fully fleshed out, such an account is able to satisfy an array of constraints on any account of the physical, as well as avoid a number of prima facie objections, without imposing Wilson's No Fundamental Mentality Constraint.

Emergentism and supervenience physicalism

“…6 Methodological Definitions: Instead of speaking of a future physics, which might go terribly wrong, or an ideal physics, which remains vague, perhaps we can define physicalism in terms of the methodology of physics. That is, the physical is all that can be acknowledged using the basic methods of verification and theorizing used by current physics [Dowell 2006]. This, of course, is vague as well, and perhaps that is enough reason to reject it, but for my purposes it has another crucial failing: it is epistemic.…”

“…Perhaps this assumption is right, but it is not obviously so. It is very difficult to imagine how one might define the essential feature common to all physical things but that all non-physical things lack, at least prior to the completion of our investigation into those things [Chomsky 1972;Dowell 2006]. This problem, I think, scuttles many attempts to define the physical, but philosophers try to elude it in various ways, with varying degrees of success.…”

Physicalism, Not Scientism

“…Maybe instead of understanding physicalism as the view that the world is fundamentally the way current physics says it is, we should take it as the view that the world is fundamentally the way the future, true, final, completed physical theory says it is. This interpretative strategy relieves physicalism of the problem of being false and so has been embraced by many philosophers (Lewis 1983, Loewer 2001, Dowell 2006 (Hempel 1980).…”

Ectoplasm Earth

“…On how to defi ne 'the physical' see for instanceHempel (1970),Montero (1999),Gillett and Witmer (2001), Papineau (2002, Chapter 1),Dowell (2006),Wilson (2006), andWorley (2006). On understanding 'nothing over and above' see for instanceHorgan (1983) and(1993),Lewis (1983),Kim (1998),Wilson (1999) and(2005),Stoljar (2001), andMelnyk (2003).…”