From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 06 2003 - 21:26:48 BST
David, my detractors and hecklers,
I gotta' hand it to David. I really do. He has pushed me into a very, very awkward position. Playing the game that pragmatists love to do, he has drawn out some consequences of pragmatism and has dared me to back down. Nice, very nice. Unlike I think pretty much everyone else on the subject of physicalism, David's shifted from talk about inconsistency, which begs the question and won't get you anywhere in persuasion, to talk about utility and language. Its still, in a way, about inconsistency, but its from my very own idiom. He's speaking my language.
David's challenge amounts to this: "physicalism" carries too much metaphysical baggage for a pragmatist to use. Its a practical question. Do I try to rehabilitate it, or do I try to invent something new to take its place? The irony that I hope people are catching is that this is the same angle I took with the term "metaphysics". I came out on the side of replacing "metaphysics". Will I decide to replace "physicalism"?
Thankfully, these are practical questions and have nothing to do with logical consequences. But I do need to face up to this choice. As David said, a good bet would be to try and make a distinction between materialism and physicalism. Not a bad idea. However, I don't think I need to. The reason is because the pragmatist already redescibes terms into non-metaphysical terms. That's what non-reductive physicalism is supposed to denote. "Non-reductive" means pragmatist. It means we are redescribing the term as a way of talking, a habit of speech. Physicalism as a way of speaking has no metaphysical baggage because it was already weeded out with the "non-reductive". Non-reductive physicalism already distinguishes itself from its metaphysical counterparts to not need a new term. In fact, "non-reductive physicalism" is a new term. And because we haven't actually changed the vocabulary "physicalism" refers to (though it may someday be replaced) we should keep it as the t
erm of the vocabulary.
David does run together two challenges to me in the last post. One was that physicalism carries too much baggage, which I decided to grasp, and the other was that physicalism is already out-dated. This last claim I don't see. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about particles or energy, both are physical, nothing really fundamental has changed about the vocabulary. Why? Because the physicalist vocabulary isn't about describing things as particles or waves, but about describing things microstructurally, whatever way we end up describing that microstructure in the end. And I don't think this stretches mircostructural too far that it includes everything. It just means that it doesn't matter whether we are talking about atoms or indeterminate quanta. I will concede one point: that one of the key points of physicalism is that it must use non-purposeful, mechanistic explanations. This can be seperated from the claim that some objects in the universe are physical. H
owever, the way physicalism runs the two claims together, I think, is still useful for certain intentions, certain investigations, certain fields of inquiry.
So, since I'm keeping "physicalism" because I can redescribe it non-metaphysically, does that mean I'm going to recind on my rejection of the term "metaphysics"? No, certainly not. It just doesn't make a lot of sense, to me, to have something called "non-metaphyisical metaphysics". Why ask the question "What is real?" if you weren't going to take it seriously?
Matt
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