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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Notes toNaturalism

1. A number ofcontemporary meta-ethicists, however, do identify themselves as“non-naturalists” about moral facts (Enoch 2011, Parfit 2011,Schaffer-Landau 2003, Wedgwood 2007—see section 1.7 below). Itshould also be noted that philosophers concerned with religion are notalways enthusiastic about “naturalism” (see the essays in Craig andMoreland 2000).

2. Philosophers whounderstand “naturalism” in a generous sense include JohnMcDowell (1996), David Chalmers (1996), and Jennifer Hornsby(1997).

3. For the purposes ofwhat follows, we shall understand“physical”negatively, as referring to entitiesthat are not fundamentally mental (or vital) (Montero and Papineau 2005, Wilson 2006). While otherdefinitions of “physical” are possible, nothing much hangson the choice of a definition, for as long as there is empirical reason toaccept thecompleteness of “physics”, however“physics” is defined, the arguments for and against“physicalism” will be work the same way (Spurrett andPapineau 1999). Onevirtue of the negative definition adopted here is that it makes itclear that we are not looking to science to define“physical”, and so that we avoid “Hempel’sDilemma” that neither current nor ideal science seemswell-suited to this definitional job (Hempel 1969). From theperspective we have adopted, the role of science is to tell us whetheror not the “physical” realm is complete, not to define“physical”.

4. “The flood ofprojects over the last two decades that attempt to fit mentalcausation or mental ontology into a ‘naturalistic picture of theworld’ strike me as having more in common with political orreligious ideology than with a philosophy that maintains perspectiveon the difference between what is known and what is speculated.Materialism is not established, or even deeply supported, byscience” (Burge 1993a).

5. According to thehistorian F.M. Turner (1974) “the contemporary significance ofthis law [conservation of energy] was immense and probably moredestructive to a supernatural interpretation of nature than wasevolution by natural selection”. We would like to thank DaanWegener for information about this issue.

6. For considerationsin favour of viewing the relata of causation in this way in thecontext of the mental causation debate, see Honderich (1982), Robb andHeil (2014: Section 5), Yalowitz (2015: Section 6).

7. There may also beroom for physicalists to query whether the above examples of“downwards” causation are really cases of physical effectswithout physical causes. A generic cause is not necessarily aphysically irreducible cause. The temperature in a gas is genericrelative to specific particle movements, but still type identifiablewith mean kinetic energy. Similarly, a desire might be genericrelative to specific neuronal arrangements, yet still reducible tosome generic brain state. This suggests that the real significance ofthe proportionality approach may not be to allow non-reduced specialcauses, but rather to show that physically generic special causes neednot always be eclipsed by their more specific physical realizers (seePapineau 2013).

8. The 2013 PhilPaperssurvey “What do Philosophers Believe?” found that 56.5% ofthe philosophers surveyed “accept or lean towards”physicalism about the mind, as against 27.1% who “accept or leantowards” non-physicalism, and 16.4% who are “others”(https://philpapers.org/surveys/).

9. Leibniz’s“pre-established harmony” similarly denies that mental states havephysical effects. But where standard “epiphenomenalism” atleast allows that conscious states are caused by brain states, Leibnizheld that the physical and conscious realms are causally quiteindependent.

10. It might seemconfusing that this Putnamian view is here classified as“non-naturalist”. What could be more naturalist than theview that mathematics is warranted because of its role in scientifictheories? But recall the distinction between methodological andontological naturalism. Putnam’s view is certainlymethodologically naturalist, but ontologically he is committed tofacts that are non-natural in the sense that they transcend thespatiotemporal realm.

11. Moreover, Jacksonargues that any identification of a folk kind with a fundamentalkindmust involve a demonstration that the fundamental kindfills the relevant folk conceptual role (this assumption is crucial tothe “two-dimensional” argument formind-body dualism, as in Jackson 1993; Chalmers 1996). However, someof Jackson’s arguments for this claim are puzzling. He says thatwe could only have found out that temperature = mean kinetic energy,say, via a demonstration that mean kinetic energy plays the samecausal role as temperature (Jackson 2003: 254–5). That isplausible enough. But there is no obvious reason why our knowledge ofthis causal role should come from analysis of the folk concept oftemperature. The derivation would work just as well if this wereinductive knowledge derived froma posteriori observation oftemperatures.

12.“\(\exists!\Phi(T(\Phi))\)” abbreviates“\(\exists\Phi(T(\Phi) \mathop\& \forall\Psi(T(\Psi)\rightarrow (\Psi = \Phi)))\)”.

13. For one ambitious attempt toexplain the processes by whicha priori armchair philosophycan deliver synthetic knowledge, see Strevens 2019.

14. Of course theaural or visual perception ofsentences is likely to playsome role in the individual acquisition of cultural knowledge. But itis arguable that this role should be viewed as causal rather thanjustificatory, and thus as consistent with thea prioristatus of the knowledge (see Burge 1993b).

15. While there is an extensivecontemporary debate about the importance of intuitions in philosophy(DePaul and Ramsey 1998, Knobe and Nicholls 2008, Cappelen 2012),their status as analytic or synthetic is rarely addressed. (None ofthese influential articles about philosophical intuitions so much asmentions the analytic-synthetic distinction: Weinberg, Nichols andStich 2001, Goldman 2007, Nagel 2007, Pust 2014.) No doubt this is aresult of Quine’s doubts. Still, these doubts do not rule outall notions of analyticity. For example, the notion of a statementwhose truth follows from logic and definitions will serve well enoughfor present purposes (Papineau 2015, see also Russell 2008). (ThisFregean notion of analyticity implies that logic is trivially analyticand also gives us a sense in which non-logical analyticities are“made true” by the meanings of their non-logicalterms. Note, however, that it does not imply thatlogicaltruths are in any sense “made true” by the meanings oftheirlogical terms, nor that they can be known to be truevia a grasp of such meanings. This entry will take logical knowledgeas given and adopt no view on its explanation.)

16. There might seemto be an obvious difference between the scientific and philosophicalthought experiments, indeed one that argues that the latter trade inthe analytic structure of concepts. Galileo’s intuition may havebeen correct, but it was still clearly answerable to directobservational tests which might in principle have falsified it: will abody indeed still fall at the same speed when it is tied to another?But there seems nothing similar in philosophical cases like Gettierthought experiments: we already know what we will judge when we meetany actual true justified believers whose beliefs are true byluck—the thought experiment itself shows us that we will judgethat they aren’t knowers. This apparent unfalsifiability of thephilosophical intuition might seem to show that it isn’tsynthetic but analytic. However this is not conclusive. An alternativediagnosis of the apparent unfalsifiability would be that everydaymethods offer no alternativedirect route to judgements ofknowledge save that behind the original intuition; this is consistentwith the intuition being synthetic and so subject toindependenttheoretical assessment (see Papineau 2014:section V).

Copyright © 2020 by
David Papineau<david.papineau@kcl.ac.uk>

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