A review of Devitt and Sterelny

Kelley Ross argues that the phenomenon of language has anti-physicalist implications, which the authors treat dismissively.

Naturalism without Physicalism?

Doctor Logic asked me what I thought the difference was between naturalism and physicalism. I think for anything to be "naturalistic" in any recognizable sense, it looks as if it has to have the characteristics of the physical that I mention: absence at the most basic level of purpose, intentionality, subjectivity, and normativity. It must be physical in at least these senses if it is naturalism is to have any meaning.

Sometimes people say that a physicalist will not allow abstract entities, but a naturalist can. But that's not going to do us any good in providing a naturalist response to the argument from reason. The AFR is about explaining how we come to have certain mental states. What do those abstract entities have to do with our coming to have mental states of a certain kind?

D. M. Armstrong once wrote; "I suppose that if the principles involved (in analysis at the physical level) were completely different from the current prinicples of physics, in particular if they involved appeal to mental entities, such as purposes, we might count the analysis as a falsification of naturalism."

Bonjour's case against physicalism

This is Lawrence Bonjour's case against physicalism

Reply to an old response from Doctor Logic

There was an important response from Doctor Logic a month or so back which requires a response.
On to your main argument...Science was free to analyze what was quantitatively analyzable through mechanistic analysis and treat everything else as mental.I think the distinction that was made was between the objective and the subjective, not between mind and matter. I wrote a long response about this, but I think I can summarize it very briefly.Science is about isolating properties of things from biases of observers. That is, isolating properties are part of the thing itself rather than accidental side-effects of interactions with particular observers.An objective property of a system is a property that inheres in the system itself, independent of knowing anything about the external observer.I cannot say that music is objectively pleasant until I specify who is listening to it (i.e., put an observer in the system). So, I could say that Beethoven's 6th is objectively pleasant to me but not objectely pleasant in and of itself. Hence, pleasantness of music is subjective.However, by using instrumentation and external verifiers, we can show that sodium is objectively explosive in contact with water. We don't need to know anything about the experimenter to state this fact.Now, historically, it may be the case that some regarded the objective-subjective distinction as a mind-matter distinction (I don't know if it is or isn't the case). However, that's not necessary to the success of reductionist science. What's necessary is an objective-subjective distinction for systems.This would be my answer to your question "how did that work back then?"

VR: Here’s the problem I have with this. So long as we can include both subjective and objective features of reality as part of the furniture of the world, you can make a distinction between subject and objective features of the world that the early reductions required. The problem is that if reality is ultimately physical, then in the last analysis nothing is really subjective. In the last analysis subjective states are not subjective after all. What is ultimately real are physical states and combinations thereof. What is real are physical states and states that are logically entailed by the existence of those physical states. The subjective is expunged from orthodox physical descriptions, and there is no entailment from physical states to subjective states. Hence the “siphoning off” that was so essential for the early reductions will not work for mental states, and as a result the very thing that made a reduction of temperature to the mean kinetic energy of gases plausible makes the reduction of the mental to the physical implausible.

Hasker on the divide and conquer strategy

Typically in the philosophy of mind we hear that there are two kinds of problems for naturalists. One is to account for raw experience or raw feels. Given physicalism, can we have the sorts of experiences that we would ordinarily think we have. The other concerns our intentional states.
Now many philosophers have suggested that the latter problem is less of a serious problem for physicalism than the former problem. The argument from reason deals primarily with the latter problem, and so in some sense it might be thought to be superfluous in this sense: if physicalists can get around the problem of qualia, dealing with intentionality or reasoning should be pretty easy.

Steven Stoljar in the essay on Physicalism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:

As with the knowledge argument, the issues surrounding Kripke's argument are very much wide open. But it is important to note that most philosophers don't consider the issues of intentionality as seriously as the issue of qualia when it comes to physicalism. In different vocabularies, for example, both Block (1995) and Chalmers (1996) distinguish between the intentional aspects of the mind or consciousness, and the phenomenal aspects or qualia, and suggest that it is really the latter that is the central issue. As Chalmers notes (1996; p. 24), echoing Chomsky's famous distinction, the intentionality issue is a problem, but the qualia issue is a mystery.

William Hasker, however, does not seem to see it quite this way. He writes:

A maneuver that has recently become somewhat popular needs to be taken account of here. Some philosophers have thought it plausible to accept a functionalist account specifically for intentional states, while conceding the "phenomenal properties" objection for qualia and giving some other account (e.g., token identity) for those states. Once again let us concede, for the sake of argument, that th functinoalisty can successfully identify intentional states in causal-functional terms. Even so, ther eare at least two reasons why this maneuver does not succeed in disposting of the materialist's problem with intentional states. For one thing, some intentional stattes do involve qualitative "feels"; being embarrassed about one's appearance is an example of such a stae. In general, emotional states involve both a particular qualitative feel and also an intentional reference to whatever it is that one is happy, sad, proud, indignant, or embarrassed about. For these particular states, the "divide and conquer"strategy can't succeed.

An even more fundamental problem, however, is encountered in the "aboutness"which is the very essence of an intentional state. There just is such a thing as thinking about something, worrying or hoping that something may happen, believing that so-and-so is the case, deciding on a certain course of action--and in such cases one ordinarily has a distinct, conscious awareness of the "intentional object" of one's mental state. This sort of mental state is utterly familiar to each one of us, and if anyone were to claim not to understand what is meant, such a claim would be entirely lacking in credibility. Furthermore, the claim that a person is in such an intentional state is clearly not equivalent, logically or conceptually, to any causal-functional description of the person. The causal-functional properties of the sate identified by functionalism can be completely described and explained in terms of the physical structure and behavior of the state in question and its relations to other physical states. There is simply no place in such a description for the "aboutness which is essential to intentional states as such. And so we can pose a question parallel to he one asked previously: Are these causal-functional states such that they essentially involve "aboutness"? If the do not involve "aboutness" then they just are not intentional states--once again, the subject has been changed. If they do, then a crucial, and logically essential, aspect of those states has been left unexplained; we still have no idea how "aboutness" is to be incorporated into a materialist world-view.