PhysicalismPhysicalism is the thesis that, in some sense, everything (beliefs, thunderstorms, people, sounds, etc.) is physical. So what exactly is it to be physical? The most common response to this question is to refer to the picture of the world that we get from the physical sciences. Under this picture, to be physical is to be describable in quantitative terms. Physical properties can be thought of as structural properties which consist in a thing's spatial and functional qualities; its dynamics.
A further condition of physicalism is that the physical world is causally closed. The causal closure thesis essentially states that every physical event has a physical cause. More strongly, it often asserts that everything that happens in the world can be explained by the causal interactions that occur at the fundamental physical level.
Physicalism is to be differentiated from materialism because materialism is committed to a very particular physical theory in which matter serves as the fundamental entity. Physicalism, while committed to physical monism, is not committed to a particular view of the fundamental physical stuff and recognizes that the basic level of reality could be non-material (e.g. energy, strings, fields).
There are several issues that have been raised concerning the truth of physicalism. First, if physicalism is true, then we should suspect that all facts will be physical facts. But, there seem to be facts that are acquainted with that have no physical description (e.g. the subjected experience of color). It may be the case that the inherent limitation of physical description artificially imposes limits on nature that don't actually exist. If this is the case, then we might suppose that nature is more robust than the physicalism allows. Allowing that nature is more robust than physicalism asserts does not require that we abandon either naturalism or science. It just requires that we recognizes that nature is fuller than the spatio-temporal descriptions that we ascribe to it.
Additional problems facing physicalism include:
1. How we explain the real existence of intentional, goal-oriented causation in nature.
2. How we explain the presence of a certain kind of organizing information in a universe consisting, in the last analysis, of nothing but blind, purposeless processes.
|
|
|
