This book explores how physicalism might best defended and formulated. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out. The first draws on the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental states as they are in themselves. More specifically, introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, and it may be that these properties really lack such features. The seriousness of this open possibility is enhanced by an analogy with our perceptual representations of secondary qualities. Our vision r ... More

This book explores how physicalism might best defended and formulated. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out. The first draws on the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental states as they are in themselves. More specifically, introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, and it may be that these properties really lack such features. The seriousness of this open possibility is enhanced by an analogy with our perceptual representations of secondary qualities. Our vision represents colors as having certain qualitative natures, and it is an open possibility, widely regarded as actual, that colors actually lack them. If it’s possible that representing phenomenal properties introspectively attributes to them qualitative natures that they actually lack, then the force of the anti-physicalism arguments might well be blunted. The second response exploits the possibility that our ignorance of things in themselves consists in part in our lack of knowledge of the fundamental intrinsic properties of things. This idea has been developed by Bertrand Russell and more recently by David Chalmers into a framework for a unified account of the mental and the physical. Currently unknown or incompletely understood fundamental intrinsic properties provide the categorical bases for the known physical dispositional properties, and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book’s third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The version of the nonreductive view endorsed departs from others in that it rejects the token identity of psychological and microphysical entities of any sort. The deepest relation between the psychological and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity.