Abstract
Materialism, as traditionally conceived, has a contingent side and a necessary side. The necessity of materialism is reflected by the metaphysics of realization, while its contingency is a matter of accepting the possibility of Cartesian worlds, worlds in which our minds are roughly as Descartes describes them. In this paper we argue that the necessity and the contingency of materialism are in conflict. In particular, we claim that if mental properties are realized by physical properties in the actual world, Cartesian worlds are impossible.
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Notes
See Melnyk (2003) for a particularly clear formulation and defense of the view.
What are the relata of the realization relation – are they properties, property instances, or a combination of both? We don’t think much hangs on this issue, for it seems that there are natural ways of thinking about realization according to which it’s a relation between properties, a relation between property instances, and as a relation between properties and property instances. This point, however, is something that we won’t pursue further here. In the main text we talk of realization as a relation between properties.
See Levine (2001), chapter 2 for a detailed defense of this view. Actually, it is consistent with our argument here to allow that, in addition to being grounded in logic, metaphysical necessities can also be grounded in non-logical a priori principles, if any there be. Mathematical truths might fit this category. This is a complicated issue, of course, and it doesn’t really affect the argument in this paper.
Again, see Levine (2001), chapter 2 for defense of this doctrine.
Why think that brute logical necessities are acceptable if brute metaphysical necessities are not? One might demand that logical necessity itself be grounded in terms of some more fundamental sort of necessity. But given that the very concept of necessity seems to be grounded in logic, this seems unreasonable. When it comes to necessity, the buck must stop somewhere, and we claim it stops with logic. To deny brute metaphysical necessity is coherent if not plausible, while to deny brute logical necessity, given the absence of any relevant more fundamental notions, seems scarcely coherent.
We have argued that realization involves metaphysical necessitation, but not brute metaphysical necessitation. Does our insistence that there is no brute metaphysical necessity lead to problems in other areas of philosophy? Consider, for example, the issue of composition in metaphysics. Suppose that (i) objects A, B, and C compose some object D in the actual world. Many claim, though Cameron (2007) is a notable exception, that composition is a metaphysically necessary relation in the sense that (ii): if (i), then, for any metaphysically possible world w in which A, B, and C exist and are arranged as they are in the actual world, they compose D in w. Markosian (1998) claims that facts like (i) are brute, and he seems to endorse (ii), qua metaphysically necessary truth. Hence, it seems that he is committed to the claim that composition involves brute metaphysical necessity, for, if (ii) were a logical truth, the truth of (i) wouldn’t be brute. If this is indeed Markosian’s position, then we can say that our admonition against brute metaphysical necessity rules it out. What are we to think about composition, then? We are inclined to treat composition much like we treat realization above: composition rests on identity claims. The idea, very roughly, is that the property, say, being a table, is identical to the property having some parts or other arranged in such-and-such way. In this case, you can derive the claim that the “table role” is filled from a sufficiently rich description of the arrangements of certain objects. In this sense, composition, qua metaphysically necessary relation, is underwritten by logic.
What about those, e.g. Kim (1992, 1998, pp. 94–95) and Lewis (1980), who claim that mental properties are identical to the role fillers for the causal role properties we have in mind above? In particular, does our argument show that materialism as they understand it is a necessary thesis? Yes it does. First, if we are talking about the mental properties themselves, then, of course, if they are identical to physical role fillers, they are necessarily physical. Second, if we’re talking about the mental concepts, the non-rigid descriptions by which, according to them, we pick out mental properties, then these apply to even alien properties in other possible worlds only by virtue of higher-order descriptions that are satisfied in a world in a non-basic way. In other words, pretty much the same considerations apply to the Kim/Lewis view as apply to the type-functionalist.
This is the formulation found in Levine (2001).
After crafting this response to Schaffer’s argument, we realized that Montero (2006) makes essentially the same point.
Montero (2006) considers something like limitless mental realization worlds and claims that materialism is false in such worlds.
As is no surprise, this conception of dispositions isn’t universally accepted. Armstrong (Armstrong et al. 1996), for example, rejects the claim that dispositions are causal role properties, distinct from their causal categorical bases qua role fillers. He argues instead that dispositions are identical to their causal categorical bases.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer at Phil Studies, as well as the participants at the conference on Mind, Body, and Realization held at Lafayette College in October of 2006, particularly Sydney Shoemaker and Gene Witmer, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Levine, J., Trogdon, K. The modal status of materialism. Philos Stud 145, 351–362 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9235-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9235-z