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8 - Knowledge Arguments and Nontheoretical Physicalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2009

Yujin Nagasawa
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

On the face of it, what has been established in Parts II and III of this work is quite pessimistic. In Part II, I maintained that the knowledge arguments in the philosophy of religion – that is, Patrick Grim's argument from knowledge de se and the argument from concept possession – are unsuccessful. In Part III, I contended that the knowledge arguments in the philosophy of mind – that is, Thomas Nagel's bat argument and Frank Jackson's Mary argument – are unsuccessful. However, as I remarked at various points of this work, the failures of the knowledge arguments shed light on a novel metaphysical view: nontheoretical physicalism.

Nontheoretical physicalism is, as its name suggests, a version of physicalism. Thus it commits to the standard physicalist claim that everything in this world, including trees, computers, stones, neutrons, and even our conscious experiences, are, in the relevant sense, all physical. The apparent differences between these entities are attributed to their ingredients, complexity, or arrangements.

As widely recognised, physicalism in general is an extremely plausible ontological thesis for which there are numerous arguments. For example, physicalism makes sense in terms of causation. It preserves the causal closure of the physical and avoids the problem of causal interaction between the mental and the physical that dualism faces. Physicalism also satisfies the principle of parsimony. Given that it is a version of monism, it is free from unnecessary metaphysical complications that dualism inherits. Moreover, physicalism conforms nicely with scientific facts.

Type
Chapter
Information
God and Phenomenal Consciousness
A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments
, pp. 135 - 146
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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