Chrisw wrote:Supervenience physicalism is usually regarded as non-reductive (at least by its supporters).

Note that the ontological/metaphysical supervenience of the mental on the physical is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for physicalism, because it is compatible with what Daniel Stoljar calls necessitation dualism (ND):

"Necessitation Dualism. The thesis that mental properties and physical properties are metaphysically distinct and yet necessarily connected."

(Stoljar, Daniel. Physicalism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. p. 235)

ND is compatible even with substance dualism, because it doesn't exclude the possibility that there are nonphysical mind/souls/spirits whose mental properties are metaphysically supervenient on physical properties. But physicalism is certainly incompatible with substance dualism.

Teuton, without some further explanation this is just gibberish. Sounds like he's just playing fast and loose with the word "metaphysical".

And please don't post a link to his argument. If you can't explain it yourself then you don't understand it, so why are you posting it?

Chrisw wrote:Teuton, without some further explanation this is just gibberish. Sounds like he's just playing fast and loose with the word "metaphysical".
And please don't post a link to his argument. If you can't explain it yourself then you don't understand it, so why are you posting it?

I could explain it myself, but why should I do so when good texts are available that explain it well. So here are links:

Supervenience: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/
Especially:
The Modal Force of the Supervenience Relation: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/#3.1

Supervenience and Mind: http://www.iep.utm.edu/supermin/
Especially:
Varities of Necessitation: http://www.iep.utm.edu/supermin/#SH3b
Ontological Failure: http://www.iep.utm.edu/supermin/#SH4b

"Since a mental-physical supervenience thesis tells us only how mental properties covary with physical properties, it is compatible not only with property dualism (as the non-reductive physicalist would hope) but also with substance dualism. Even if substance dualism were true, it might be that immaterial minds are causally connected or otherwise related to physical bodies in such a way that any variation in the properties of these immaterial minds occurs only with a variation in physical properties of the body. Physicalism certainly does not allow that substance dualism is true. So, since a supervenience thesis is compatible with substance dualism, it does not fully capture our physicalist intuitions."

Teuton wrote:"Naturalism. In general the view that everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world, and the apparent exceptions can be somehow explained away. ...The more general application is to philosophy as a whole, and again involves both the objects studied and the methods used in studying them, i.e. both metaphysics and epistemology. In metaphysics naturalism is perhaps most obviously akin to materialism, but it does not have to be materialistic. What it insists on is that the world of nature should form a single sphere without incursions from outside by souls or spirits, divine or human, and without having to accommodate strange entities like non-natural values or substantive abstract universals. But it need not reject the phenomena of consciousness, nor even identify them somehow with material phenomena, as the materialist must, provided they can be studied via the science of psychology, which can itself be integrated into the other sciences. One naturalist in fact, Hume, was rather ambivalent about whether there was really a material world at all, except in so far as it was constructed out of our experiences, or impressions and ideas, as he called them. The important thing for the naturalist in the metaphysical sphere is that the world should be a unity in the sense of being amenable to a unified study which can be called the study of nature, though it may not always be easy to say what counts as a sufficient degree of unification. Obviously there are different sciences, which to some extent employ different methods as well as studying different subject-matters. What seems to be needed is that they should form a continuous chain, and all be subject to certain general requirements regarded as necessary for a science as such, like producing results which are amenable to empirical testing. Whatever entities such sciences come up with must then be allowed into the naturalistic framework, and these will include ‘theoretical’ entities which cannot be directly observed, but whose existence is postulated to explain various phenomena, such as the electrons of physics, whether this existence is taken to be real or only ‘logically constructed’ in the way in which the average man is logically constructed out of ordinary men."

("Naturalism." In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., edited by Ted Honderich, 640-642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. pp. 640-1)

That's a nice quote, but it still doesn't change the fact that it is not particularly informative in the modern parlance:

The term ‘naturalism’ has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed ‘naturalists’ from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit’ (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003).

So understood, ‘naturalism’ is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject ‘supernatural’ entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the ‘human spirit’.

Even so, this entry will not aim to pin down any more informative definition of ‘naturalism’. It would be fruitless to try to adjudicate some official way of understanding the term. Different contemporary philosophers interpret ‘naturalism’ differently. This disagreement about usage is no accident. For better or worse, ‘naturalism’ is widely viewed as a positive term in philosophical circles—few active philosophers nowadays are happy to announce themselves as ‘non-naturalists’.[1] This inevitably leads to a divergence in understanding the requirements of ‘naturalism’. Those philosophers with relatively weak naturalist commitments are inclined to understand ‘naturalism’ in a unrestrictive way, in order not to disqualify themselves as ‘naturalists’, while those who uphold stronger naturalist doctrines are happy to set the bar for ‘naturalism’ higher.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#NatPhy

In metaphysics naturalism is perhaps most obviously akin to materialism, but it does not have to be materialistic. What it insists on is that the world of nature should form a single sphere without incursions from outside by souls or spirits, divine or human

How is a soul or spirit different from a non-material mind as believed in by dualists and idealists?

But it need not reject the phenomena of consciousness, nor even identify them somehow with material phenomena, as the materialist must, provided they can be studied via the science of psychology, which can itself be integrated into the other sciences.

Most physicalists don't reject the phenomenon of consciousness either and they don't generally identify consciousness with specific material phenomena (identity theory).

So naturalism is compatible with physicalism and not with dualism or idealism. Most people mean physicalism when they say materialism these days.

DrWho wrote:That's a nice quote, but it still doesn't change the fact that it is not particularly informative in the modern parlance.

"Most versions of naturalism can be distinguished from one another by their answers to questions like the following:

Is naturalism an epistemological claim about how we know or an ontological claim about what exists (or both or neither)?

By scientific, are we talking about science as a method or science as a set of results or findings, or both?

Is science only the non-human sciences or does it include the social and behavioural sciences as well?

Is a priori knowledge about objective reality possible?

What is the status of conceptual analysis and intuitions?

What is the relation between philosophy (in our case, metaphysics) and science? More specifically, is philosophy constrained in any way by science and, if so, what does the constraint consist in?

The answers to some of these different questions are at least to some extent logically independent, so different subsets of them may get different answers. As a result, numerous different naturalisms emerge of quite varying logical strength, thus explaining why so many doubt that there is a meaningful doctrine to be affirmed or denied. However, the existence of many different possible formulations need not entail that no specific formulation is coherent and interesting."

(Kincaid, Harold. "Introduction: Pursuing a Naturalist Metaphysics." In Scientific Metaphysics, edited by Don Ross, James Ladyman, and Harold Kincaid, 1-26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. p. 2)

Kinds of Naturalism:

1. Metaphysical Naturalism:

1.1 Ontological Naturalism:

The natural world is the entire reality; everything is natural and nothing is non-natural/supernatural.
(The spatiotemporal world is the whole world, and the only kind of substances it contains are physical ones.)

1.2 Ontological Scientism:

The posits of well-confirmed scientific theories are the only things which exist, are real, and only the belief in them is justified and rational.
Motto: Science, tell me what there is, and I believe in it!

1.3 Etiological Naturalism:

The natural world is causally closed; there are no supernatural influences on the natural course of things and no restrictions of its autonomy: if a natural event has a cause, then it has only a natural cause.

2. Epistemological Naturalism:

2.1 Scientific Empiricism (Anti-apriorism/Anti-intuitionism):

Knowledge about reality can only be attained through the empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry.
(Weaker: The empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry are the most objective and most reliable methods for attaining knowledge about reality.)

2.2 Agnostic Naturalism:

If supernatural entities and facts exist, they are unknowable (in principle).

3. Methodological Naturalism:

3.1. Metaphilosophical Scientism:

Philosophy is to be scientized, i.e. to be affiliated with or incorporated into (natural) science and to be adapted to its methods and results (as far as possible).
Motto: The days of philosophy as an a priori Geisteswissenschaft prior to (natural) science are over!

3.2 Metascientific Scientism (Monism/Unificationism):

All non-natural sciences are but pseudosciences and thus no producers of genuine knowledge unless they are methodologically adapated to and modelled on natural science. So this is what is to be done!

3.3 Metascientific Nonsupernaturalism:

Always look for naturalistic explanations of all phenomena!
Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored in principle during scientific inquiries.
(Weaker: Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored during scientific inquiries as long as there is a reasonable chance of finding a naturalistic explanation, at least in the future.)

Teuton wrote:Kinds of Naturalism:

1. Metaphysical Naturalism:

1.1 Ontological Naturalism:

The natural world is the entire reality; everything is natural and nothing is non-natural/supernatural.
(The spatiotemporal world is the whole world, and the only kind of substances it contains are physical ones.)

1.2 Ontological Scientism:

The posits of well-confirmed scientific theories are the only things which exist, are real, and only the belief in them is justified and rational.
Motto: Science, tell me what there is, and I believe in it!

1.3 Etiological Naturalism:

The natural world is causally closed; there are no supernatural influences on the natural course of things and no restrictions of its autonomy: if a natural event has a cause, then it has only a natural cause.

2. Epistemological Naturalism:

2.1 Scientific Empiricism (Anti-apriorism/Anti-intuitionism):

Knowledge about reality can only be attained through the empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry.
(Weaker: The empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry are the most objective and most reliable methods for attaining knowledge about reality.)

2.2 Agnostic Naturalism:

If supernatural entities and facts exist, they are unknowable (in principle).

3. Methodological Naturalism:

3.1. Metaphilosophical Scientism:

Philosophy is to be scientized, i.e. to be affiliated with or incorporated into (natural) science and to be adapted to its methods and results (as far as possible).
Motto: The days of philosophy as an a priori Geisteswissenschaft prior to (natural) science are over!

3.2 Metascientific Scientism (Monism/Unificationism):

All non-natural sciences are but pseudosciences and thus no producers of genuine knowledge unless they are methodologically adapated to and modelled on natural science. So this is what is to be done!

3.3 Metascientific Nonsupernaturalism:

Always look for naturalistic explanations of all phenomena!
Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored in principle during scientific inquiries.
(Weaker: Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored during scientific inquiries as long as there is a reasonable chance of finding a naturalistic explanation, at least in the future.)

FFS! Ever ask yourself why?

Philosophy arrives late to the game and adds ridiculous claims about ALL and backing substance then draws up ridiculous classifications of their own mistakes only to forever fight about it all.

Naturalism is perfectly innocent and ...Natural!

ism-shit or ismism.

Teuton wrote:Kinds of Naturalism:

1. Metaphysical Naturalism:

1.1 Ontological Naturalism:

The natural world is the entire reality; everything is natural and nothing is non-natural/supernatural.
(The spatiotemporal world is the whole world, and the only kind of substances it contains are physical ones.)

1.2 Ontological Scientism:

The posits of well-confirmed scientific theories are the only things which exist, are real, and only the belief in them is justified and rational.
Motto: Science, tell me what there is, and I believe in it!

1.3 Etiological Naturalism:

The natural world is causally closed; there are no supernatural influences on the natural course of things and no restrictions of its autonomy: if a natural event has a cause, then it has only a natural cause.

2. Epistemological Naturalism:

2.1 Scientific Empiricism (Anti-apriorism/Anti-intuitionism):

Knowledge about reality can only be attained through the empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry.
(Weaker: The empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry are the most objective and most reliable methods for attaining knowledge about reality.)

2.2 Agnostic Naturalism:

If supernatural entities and facts exist, they are unknowable (in principle).

3. Methodological Naturalism:

3.1. Metaphilosophical Scientism:

Philosophy is to be scientized, i.e. to be affiliated with or incorporated into (natural) science and to be adapted to its methods and results (as far as possible).
Motto: The days of philosophy as an a priori Geisteswissenschaft prior to (natural) science are over!

3.2 Metascientific Scientism (Monism/Unificationism):

All non-natural sciences are but pseudosciences and thus no producers of genuine knowledge unless they are methodologically adapated to and modelled on natural science. So this is what is to be done!

3.3 Metascientific Nonsupernaturalism:

Always look for naturalistic explanations of all phenomena!
Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored in principle during scientific inquiries.
(Weaker: Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored during scientific inquiries as long as there is a reasonable chance of finding a naturalistic explanation, at least in the future.)

Nothing in your quote denies my basic point: Different contemporary philosophers interpret ‘naturalism’ differently

DrWho wrote:
Nothing in your quote denies my basic point: Different contemporary philosophers interpret ‘naturalism’ differently

Nothing in my quote is meant to deny this.

DrWho wrote:

Teuton wrote:Kinds of Naturalism:

1. Metaphysical Naturalism:

1.1 Ontological Naturalism:

The natural world is the entire reality; everything is natural and nothing is non-natural/supernatural.
(The spatiotemporal world is the whole world, and the only kind of substances it contains are physical ones.)

1.2 Ontological Scientism:

The posits of well-confirmed scientific theories are the only things which exist, are real, and only the belief in them is justified and rational.
Motto: Science, tell me what there is, and I believe in it!

1.3 Etiological Naturalism:

The natural world is causally closed; there are no supernatural influences on the natural course of things and no restrictions of its autonomy: if a natural event has a cause, then it has only a natural cause.

2. Epistemological Naturalism:

2.1 Scientific Empiricism (Anti-apriorism/Anti-intuitionism):

Knowledge about reality can only be attained through the empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry.
(Weaker: The empirical methods of scientific a posteriori inquiry are the most objective and most reliable methods for attaining knowledge about reality.)

2.2 Agnostic Naturalism:

If supernatural entities and facts exist, they are unknowable (in principle).

3. Methodological Naturalism:

3.1. Metaphilosophical Scientism:

Philosophy is to be scientized, i.e. to be affiliated with or incorporated into (natural) science and to be adapted to its methods and results (as far as possible).
Motto: The days of philosophy as an a priori Geisteswissenschaft prior to (natural) science are over!

3.2 Metascientific Scientism (Monism/Unificationism):

All non-natural sciences are but pseudosciences and thus no producers of genuine knowledge unless they are methodologically adapated to and modelled on natural science. So this is what is to be done!

3.3 Metascientific Nonsupernaturalism:

Always look for naturalistic explanations of all phenomena!
Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored in principle during scientific inquiries.
(Weaker: Supernaturalistic explanations are to be ignored during scientific inquiries as long as there is a reasonable chance of finding a naturalistic explanation, at least in the future.)

Nothing in your quote denies my basic point: Different contemporary philosophers interpret ‘naturalism’ differently

Meant for Teuton, not you Dr. Who.

The point is that extravagant unprovable claims are being made for a position that has mountains of evidence and no counter evidence. It's unnecessary and only leads us into silly discussions where counter-claims such as idealism or mentalism SEEM to have some weight. They do not. Just as none of these universal claims do not.

Honestly, I have to say that there is no point in trying to get at these definitions. No matter what you do, philosophers will glom onto a word and say, "Ha ha, you luser, you don't know that the School of Potatohead abandoned that approach in 1736. Nobody takes that seriously any more. The philosophy of Squigglehenny Norbrop is the only thing philosophers take seriously."

This is what philosophers do. It's what gets them fame, which they want because fortune isn't going to happen, and it lets them justify going to school without taking science courses, from professors who like to say, "The sciences are pieces of the pie, but philosophy, ah, noble philosophy, is the pie plate!" Then they completely fail to understand Special Relativity.

epepke wrote:Honestly, I have to say that there is no point in trying to get at these definitions. No matter what you do, philosophers will glom onto a word and say, "Ha ha, you luser, you don't know that the School of Potatohead abandoned that approach in 1736. Nobody takes that seriously any more. The philosophy of Squigglehenny Norbrop is the only thing philosophers take seriously."

This is what philosophers do. It's what gets them fame, which they want because fortune isn't going to happen, and it lets them justify going to school without taking science courses, from professors who like to say, "The sciences are pieces of the pie, but philosophy, ah, noble philosophy, is the pie plate!" Then they completely fail to understand Special Relativity.

I like to divide philosophy into it's two flavors. Metaphysical garbage and philosophy.

But you are right. Some people have gotten full of themselves and over-reached their job description. Arguing all these great claims keeps them employed. Much like the guy who rights best seller self-help about some woo to happiness plan.

Teuton wrote:

DrWho wrote:
Nothing in your quote denies my basic point: Different contemporary philosophers interpret ‘naturalism’ differently

Nothing in my quote is meant to deny this.

Oh

Ahh! Psychophysics. I see the possibility of a budding science there. I retract.