Non-reductive physicalism

McLaughlin, B. 1992, The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism, In Emergence or Reduction Essays on the Prospect of a Non-Reductive Physicalism, Beckerman, A. Flohr, H. Kim J., Eds. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1992, pp. 49-93, quoted from p. 54-55. 

Reductive chain physicalism was the only version of physicalism in its early days, and it still has hold on some people. It was the mind-body problem which has has led to the emergence of another version of the doctrine, non-reductive physicalism. By the seventies, many people came to believe that the mental cannot be reduced, but it should not be eliminated. So they looked for a different way to elaborate physicalism, and they found it in the notion of the supervenience. They formulate the doctrine as saying that everything supervenes on the physical. 

To show that internal realism is indeed compatible with non-reductive physicalism, we have to consider the central theses of internal realism. Let us begin with (IR1), which asserts that the structure of the world is ontologically dependent... 

Stephan, A. 1992. Emergence a Systematic View on its Historical Facets. In Beckermann, A., Flohr, H. and Kim, J. (eds.), Emergence or Reduction Essays on the Prospectsfor Non-Reductive Physicalism. Berlin Walter de Gruyter, 25-48. 

This model would have to have both physical and mental variables (P and M) which causally overdetemined an event. So say we had a model Mp that provided a sufficient actual cause for event E, and we had another model A/m that also provided a sufficient actual cause for that same event. Now imagine we can create a model Mpm to describe the causation of E, which takes variable from both Mm and Mp. Within this model, E would be causally overdetermined by variables from M and P because there would be two sufficient actual causes within the same model. But Weslake argues that under the assumptions of interventionism and non-reductive physicalism, no such causal model can exist (2007 12). 

The next two chapters apply the core notion and a few derivative notions to reduction debates in the philosophy of mind (Chap. 6) and the philosophy of science (Chap. 7). Type-identity theories, token-identity theories, conceptions of non-reductive physicalism, and the model of functional reduction can easily be reconstructed based on the explication proposed here, sometimes in an improved form (for example, on the view presented here, it becomes immediately clear where the directionality stems from - an aspect that has been ignored in the heat of the... 

In Emergence or reduction Essays on the prospects of non-reductive physicalism, ed. Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim, 157-179. Berlin de Gruyter. 

Now, type identity theories have been extensively criticized. Physicalists opposed to type-identity theory usually conceive of themselves as non-reducHve physicalists. Interestingly, understanding what non-reductive physicalism consists in requires us to understand what this doctrine is opposed to - namely, reductionism about (mental) types. Moreover, non-reductive physicalists often describe themselves as token-identity theorists, they assume that mental tokens reduce to physical tokens, so that there is strong unity at the token-level. Again, a notion of identity-based reduction is required to hilly understand this idea. The explication offered here cannot only be fruitfully applied in the context of type identity theory. The next section is dedicated to the connection between the explication of reduction and token identity theories. 

The notions of type- and token-reduction introduced here bear upon an appropriate understanding of anti-reductionist aspirations in the context of ontological non-reductive physicalism If we assume that there are different, irreducible kinds of properties, but still assume that token- or substance monism is true, then we could use the notion of token-reduction and type-reduction to capture this idea. Non-reductive physicalism, in its ontological version, consists in the affirmation of token-reduction and the denial of type-reduction for the relevant class of tokens and types. The explication proposed above enables us to give an idea of what reductive type- and token-identity theories consist in, and, combing the two, it yields a characterization of non-reductive physicalism. The next sections discuss the application of the explication of reduction to more recent versions of type-identity theory. 

The explication proposed in the first part of this book sheds light on conceptions in the philosophy of mind, such as various conceptions of type identity theory, token identity theory and non-reductive physicalism. We thereby motivated the explication - it is not only adequate, but also fruitfiil. 

This is not to say that Kim supports either emergence or non-reductive physicalism. In fact he argues that non-reductive physicalism in particular represents an unstable position (Kim, 1999). 

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