Abstract
In his recent book Physicalism, Daniel Stoljar argues that there is no version of physicalism that is both true and deserving of the name. His argument employs a variation of Hilary Putnam’s famous twin-earth story, which Stoljar calls “the twin-physics world.” In this paper, I challenge Stoljar’s use of the twin-physics world. The upshot of that challenge, I argue, is that Stoljar fails to show, concerning the versions of physicalism for which he grants the possibility of being true, that none of them is deserving of the name.
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Notes
Throughout this paper, then, the presentations of different versions of physicalism will focus on their distinctive characterizations of a physical property.
Stoljar assumes that we do know (and can even roughly define) what a physical object is on the basis of exemplars, e.g. a washing machine and a rock. Yet, according to Stoljar, physicalism is formulated in terms of physical properties, and “it is not a trivial matter to extend the idea of physicality from objects to properties” (2010, pp. 52–54).
For Putnam’s twin-earth story, see Putnam (1975).
Note as well that it cannot be that the twin-physics world serves Stoljar’s purposes so long as it provides a world at which physicalism intuitively holds despite its fundamental properties being different than those posited by actual physics. The atomist world is such a world. Yet, as previously indicated, Stoljar confesses that the atomist world is unlikely to disconfirm actual theory physicalism, since actual theory physicalism need not be limited to counting as physical properties those properties expressed in the true statements of actual physics. More, then, is expected of Stoljar’s twin-physics world, namely, that twin-mass, twin-charge, and twin-spin cannot be expressed in the language of actual physics more broadly construed. The primary contention at the present, though, is that Stoljar cannot even get the initial step of having physicalism intuitively hold for his twin-physics world.
For Carl Hempel’s presentation of the dilemma, see Hempel (1969).
References
Hempel, C. (1969). Reduction: Ontological and linguistic facets. In S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, & M. White (Eds.), Philosophy, science, and method: Essays in honor of Ernest Nagel (pp. 179–199). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). Philosophy and our mental life. In H. Putnam (Ed.), Mind, language and reality: Philosophical papers (Vol. 2, pp. 291–303). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stoljar, D. (2010). Physicalism. London and New York: Routledge.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Adam Podlaskowski and two anonymous referees for Philosophia for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Baltimore, J.A. Stoljar’s Twin-Physics World. Philosophia 41, 127–136 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9377-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9377-2