Jackson-Lewis physicalism

Jackson-Lewis physicalism Every positive truth and every truth concerning laws and causation are metaphysically necessitated by truths concerning the spatiotemporal distribution of instantiations of fundamental physical properties and relations and the fundamental physical laws. ... 

Davidson s anomalous monism is usually thought of as a version of nonreductive physicalism. But its commitment to physicalism may be rather weak because, though Davidson does endorse the causal closure of physics, it is not clear that he agrees with the supervenience claim I call Jackson-Lewis physicalism since he denies that there are tight connections between the mental and the physical. 

Frank Jackson (1998a) and David Chalmers (1996) characterize physicalism as the claim that every truth is necessitated by the totality of truths in the complete language of ideal fundamental physics and the laws of fundamental physics and a statement to the effect that this is the totality of fundamental truths and laws. (The latter can be avoided by restricting the characterization to positive truths.) They hold additionally that the entailments required by physicalism are a priori. I do not assume that here. David Lewis (1983) earlier provided a similar characterization of physicalism. There are issues concerning how to define fundamental physical property or ideal physics and whether this account is sufficient for physicalism. (It is surely necessary.) I discuss these issues in Loewer (2001). 

The story I have to tell about the views of Chalmers (1996) and Jackson (1994, 1998a) is much like that for Lewis — the physicalism that they are mainly concerned with (and that they are — were, in Jackson s case — mainly concerned to oppose) is ontological physicalism. 

As I mentioned, Kim, Lewis, Chalmers, and Jackson all have a rather diflferent picture of theoretical identity than the one sketched here. Focusing on Kim, as I explained earlier Kim sees the role of identities as really a matter of specifying a realizer of the functional role of a mental state rather than capturing the metaphysical nature of a mental state. And this difference reflects a view of reductive explanation in which the role of reduction of, say, water, is not to find the physical ground of water but rather a matter of finding what plays the water role here and now. 

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