Abstract
Russellian monism—an influential doctrine proposed by Russell (The analysis of matter, Routledge, London, 1927/1992)—is roughly the view that physics can only ever tell us about the causal, dispositional, and structural properties of physical entities and not their categorical (or intrinsic) properties, whereas our qualia are constituted by those categorical properties. In this paper, I will discuss the relation between Russellian monism and a seminal paradox facing epiphenomenalism, the paradox of phenomenal judgment: if epiphenomenalism is true—qualia are causally inefficacious—then any judgment concerning qualia, including epiphenomenalism itself, cannot be caused by qualia. For many writers, including Hawthorne (Philos Perspect 15:361–378, 2001), Smart (J Conscious Stud 11(2):41–50, 2004), and Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (The philosophy of mind and cognition, Blackwell, Malden, 2007), Russellian monism faces the same paradox as epiphenomenalism does. I will assess Chalmers’s (The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press, New York, 1996) and Seager’s (in: Beckermann A, McLaughlin BP (eds) The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind. Oxford University Press, New York, 2009) defences of Russellian monism against the paradox, and will put forward a novel argument against those defences.
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Notes
Some philosophers call these properties ‘intrinsic properties’ instead. That does not affect the structure of RM and the arguments I will discuss.
Robinson (2018) provides another interesting comparison between RM and epiphenomenalism. While my discussion is compatible with and potentially relevant to his, his concern is not PPJ.
See Chalmers (1996) for a detailed overview.
Another possible interpretation is that the two kinds of properties are identical. See Sect. 4.1 for a discussion of this view.
I assume that most readers are familiar with Chalmers’s zombie argument and thus will not introduce it here.
Our actual categorical bases are assumed not to be zombie bases for the sake of the argument, because we are assuming that RM is true. However, without the assumption that RM is true, it is possible that our actual categorical bases are zombie bases.
I am heavily indebted to Frank Jackson for a discussion with respect to this point.
While Nozick’s account is seminal, it has some more developed variants in the literature which take probability, distance between possible worlds, and so on into account. For the sake of simplicity, however, I shall not discuss them.
Heil’s identity theory does not allow for multiple realisability and is thus much stronger than the identity theory used by Smart (2007) to explain the mind/body relation.
It is noteworthy that, in a seminal paper on metaphysics (2005), Heil provides some independent reasons for rejecting the idea of multiple realisability. With this in mind, he might reasonably reject the implication. Nonetheless, the rejection of multiple realisability is, doubtlessly, a very radical view which very few would accept.
Of course, we may not know exactly how to bridge the gap, but a view widely accepted among scientists and physicalist philosophers is: contemporary brain sciences lead us to expect that advances in those disciplines will eventually reveal the answer to the question, and to thereby believe that physicalism is true (see, for example, Churchland 1996; Hohwy and Frith 2004; Chan and Latham forthcoming).
This view is in fact very similar to an assumption of RM: the scientific categorical ignorance thesis (see Sect. 1).
I am indebted to Daniel Stoljar for raising this objection.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge David Braddon-Mitchell, Belinda Calderone, Michael Duncan, Frank Jackson, Justine Kingsbury, Andrew James Latham, James Norton, Luke Roelofs, Daniel Stoljar, Lei Zhong, the philosophy of mind group at the Australian National University, and participants in my presentations of this paper at the University of Sydney and the National Taiwan University for their useful discussions or comments. Special thanks are due to Belinda Rickard.
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Chan, LC. Can the Russellian Monist Escape the Epiphenomenalist’s Paradox?. Topoi 39, 1093–1102 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9579-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9579-8