Physicalism, or Something Near Enough

by Jaegwon Kim

Book Overview

Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or "how much") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691133859
• ISBN13: 9780691133850
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant, if Unconvincing

Jaegwon Kim is one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers of mind, and this may be his finest work. Kim's position on the mind-body problem has evolved significantly over the last three decades, and here he has reached what he suggests is his final verdict. "Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough" contains some material that has appeared before, but is refined here, as well as some original material. It's set forth clearly and reads mellifluously. Kim first explains the mind-body problem, which he understands to be two related problems about whether the mental can be reduced to the physical and whether the mental is causally efficacious. He then sets forth his supervenience/exclusion argument for the conclusion that insofar as the mental is causal efficacious it must be reducible to the physical. Kim devotes some space to defending his argument against the objections of Ned Block, among others. The supervenience/exclusion argument is supposed to show that non-reductive physicalism, claiming that irreducibly mental properties are causally efficacious, is false. Kim considers substance dualism as an alternative. Kim argues that substance dualism, claiming that there are distinct mental and physical kinds of substances, doesn't allow for mental causation, and so is false. After describing the nature of reduction and reductive explanation, he settles for a version of reductionism according to which mental properties that are causally efficacious are reducible to functional properties, the realizers of which science is to discover. Kim assesses other arguments for reductive versions of physicalism as the best explanation of various phenomena, and concludes that these arguments fail. Finally, Kim concludes that the mental is partly reducible to the physical and partly not, cognitive/intentional properties are reducible but qualia (felt qualities) are not. I have two objections. First, Kim's conclusion that qualia are largely not causally efficacious seems false. Secondly, Kim's argument against substance dualism is a version of the pairing problem originally formulated and rejected by John Foster, but Kim doesn't engage with Foster's response to the problem. Kim thinks that he has solved the mind-body problem. I doubt that very many philosophers will agree that he has, and I hope that he will produce more work of this rare quality in the future. "Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough" may become a classic in the philosophy of mind. I recommend it to upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students and philosophers working in the philosophy of mind. Those without some exposure to contemporary analytic philosophy of mind may find it very difficult. Readers may also be interested in Andrew Melnyk's "A Physicalist Manifesto", which sets forth an explanatory argument of the type Kim rejects for physicalism, and John Foster's "The Immaterial Self", which defends substance dualism against the type of objections levelled by Kim.

Excellent discussion of supervenience

This is a very nice book written with exceptional clarity by one of the foremost authorities on supervenience. Its centerpiece is an argument against mental to physical causation given certain assumptions plausible to physicalists. The argument is exhaustively (if not exhaustingly) rigorous and seemingly valid. There are some mistakes here, though. Most importantly, Kim tries to go on to argue against mental to mental causation in a flawed manner (simple skew product transformations such as (x,y) -> (x+a,x+y) provide immediate counterexamples to the form of his argument). Elsewhere he claims there is no basis for the causal efficacy of mental entities at all because our very notion of causal relations requires entities that are situated in space-time. Epistemically at least, this is to put the cart before the horse...we only locate physical entities in space in virtue of their causal relations with other entities. <br /> <br />This isn't just Kim's fault...philosophy still hasn't fully digested the Humean lesson that all causation, even physical-physical causation, is brute. For all Kim manages to convincingly say to the contrary, the dualist can reply that there really may be mental entities, they really may be causally efficacious, and the reason why may really be "just because"...this has always been, after all, a good enough reason for the causal efficacy of our favorite sub-atomic particles. Natural necessity, unlike logical necessity, doesn't have to make any sense (at least at bottom), and not all components of a working dynamical system need be space-time fixable in virtue of their causal relations. <br /> <br />A final mistake concerns Kim's handling of epiphenomenalism. It's possible to take enough care in entertaining epiphenomenalism that you don't end up requiring realization of near-zero probability events in order to explain the evolution of consciousness. Keep in mind that some types of functionalism are almost surely ruled out by the time-complexity of certain reverse-engineering tasks; it simply wouldn't be possible for the universe to figure out, by looking at most types of artificial minds, what they're doing fast enough to tell them in any kind of appropriate way what it should be "like" to be running the algorithm they are running. What that means is that brains have options when evolving about whether to include consciousness as part of the game or not. That they've opted to include it demonstrates, at least probabilistically, that it helps. It's oftentimes pointed out that, due to such-and-such bad philosophy, it's not at all clear how it would help. Well, obviously. What's clear isn't *how* it helps, but *that* it helps. (This complaint doesn't apply to the epiphenomenalism that David Chalmers considers...one could agree with Chalmers and still say that yes something helps, but you can still abstract away the what-it's-like aspect of whatever it is that helps, and claim that *that* doesn't help; Kim's wording isn't ca