5.2 Four Physicalist Arguments and the Case Against Dualism

A collection of vocabulary flashcards covering Jack Smart's arguments for physicalism, historical reductions, and critiques of dualist emergence from Lecture 5.2.

Physicalism

The philosophical position that there are compelling reasons to believe everything is physical, suggesting that consciousness will eventually be reduced to physical concepts.

Jack Smart's Meta Induction

An argument stating that because fields once thought to be irreducible, like chemistry and microbiology, were successfully reduced to physics, we should expect the same for consciousness.

Vitalism

A popular 1800s view that life possesses a non-physical force or animation that cannot be explained by physical science alone.

Elan Vital

The 'life force' proposed by vitalists to explain why cells and organisms are alive, move, and reproduce.

Occam's Razor

The principle that given two theories which explain the phenomena equally, one should prefer the theory with the simplest ontology.

Ontology

The study of what exists; physicalism is argued to be superior to dualism because its ontology is simpler—$1$ type of substance versus $2$.

Explanatory Gap

A dualist response to physicalism claiming that physicalism fails to provide a real explanation for consciousness, making it an insufficient theory.

Dualism of the Gaps

A physicalist critique of dualism, suggesting it is an ad hoc theory with no real explanatory power other than to point out what physicalism cannot yet explain.

Ad Hoc Explanation

An explanation created for one specific occasion or problem; Jack Smart argues that claiming a mind-brain connection as a brute fact feels 'fishy' because it is ad hoc.

Emergentism

The view that nature regularly produces cases where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, such as in biological functions, sociology, or complex system science.

Transordinal Laws

Laws that relate things at one level to a higher level; physicalists argue these do not exist in science as we typically explain high-level phenomena through low-level laws.

Nomological Danglers

Jack Smart's term for laws that 'hang around freely' and bridge the low to the high without being integrated into the explanations used in fundamental sciences.

Dismissivist

A physicalist stance that involves resisting dualist arguments by being dismissive of how we typically conceive of the world and consciousness.