Persons. An Interdisciplinary Approach - Austrian Ludwig ...

Multiple Realizability and Property-Identities: An Incompatible Couple? - Sven Walter
Weltanschauung, driven by the desire to apply the—in
other areas so successful—physicalist worldview to the
human mind. But physicalism is, very roughly, the claim
that everything is physical; it is not the claim that mental
properties are neurophysiological properties. Formulating
the identity-theory in terms of IT is thus in the spirit of the
traditional project of physicalism. Far from being ad hoc, it
constitutes one legitimate attempt among others to capture
the intent of physicalism as our prevailing
Weltanschauung.
Reply 2: A comprehensive answer would exceed
the scope of this paper, but the general idea is that
philosophers usually adopt a rather naïve view of physical
properties. They tend to assume that to any ‘legitimate’
physical property there must correspond an ordinary,
projectible predicate, pre-formed already in our mundane
or scientific language. But physical reality is more complex
than philosophers tend to think of it, and the class of
physical properties is larger than we assume. 7 If we take
our commitment to physicalism seriously, we must give up
our philosophically naïve conception of physical properties
and ask the physicists what physical properties really are.
Without an adequate and substantial conception of
physical properties, (3) is difficult—if not impossible—to
evaluate. This is not to say that it is false, but the burden of
proof is with the defender of MRA: she must offer a good
argument for why we should accept (3), given our
ignorance about the nature of physical properties. Barring
any such arguments, I dare conclude that multiple
realizability and psychophysical property-identities are not
incompatible. 8
7 For example, Mark Wilson has argued that in order to do its job physics must
accept "that extremely generous mathematical methods for constructing new
traits [i.e. properties; S.W.] from old [ones] are legitimate" (Wilson 1985, 232).
In fact, Wilson claims, physics must be so liberal that just any real-valued
function of the state-variables of a system counts as a genuine property of that
system.
8 Thanks to Diana Raffman for comments and criticisms.
References
Corbí, J.E. and Prades, J.L. 2000 Minds, Causes, and
Mechanisms. A Case Against Physicalism, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kim, J. 1998 Mind in a Physical World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Putnam, H. 1967 "Psychological Predicates", in W.H. Capitan and
D.D. Merrill (eds.), Art, Mind, and Religion, Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 37-48.
Shapiro, L. 2000 "Multiple Realizations", The Journal of
Philosophy, 97, 635-654.
Wilson, M 1985 "What Is this Thing Called ‘Pain’? The Philosophy
of Science behind the Contemporary Debate", Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly, 66, 227-267.
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