Last updated 2nd August 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. As we resolve the issues resulting from this, we are also experiencing some delays to publication. We are working hard to restore services as soon as possible and apologise for the inconvenience. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2016
Materialism claims that everything is physical; everything can be exhaustively described and explained in principle by physics. For over half a century challenges to materialism have focused on mental phenomena such as consciousness, reason, and value. The tacit assumption among most materialists – one shared by most of their critics – has been that more basic biological phenomena, such as metabolism and reproduction, do not pose a serious obstacle to the materialist program, that these can be easily accommodated within a materialist framework. But there is reason to think that this assumption is false. Thomas Nagel has recently argued that materialism cannot countenance biological phenomena at large. Like so many anti-materialist arguments, however, his focuses on mental phenomena. After explaining why this is a liability for him and other would-be critics of materialism, I advance an anti-materialist argument that appeals directly to biology. Materialism is false, it says, because our best empirical descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena appeal to biological organization or structure, and there is good reason to think that these appeals cannot be eliminated, reduced to, or paraphrased in favor of descriptions and explanations framed in exclusively physical terms. As a result, not everything can be described and explained exhaustively by physics. Materialism must be false. The reason, however, has nothing to do with mental phenomena specifically.
1 Philosophers sometimes use the term ‘materialism’ to refer to much weaker claims, such as the claim that everything has physical properties, that all properties supervene on physical properties, or that everything is composed of physical parts. These weaker claims are compatible with things having nonphysical properties in addition to physical ones. Materialism in the strong sense I have in mind rules this out. It implies the core materialist thesis, the claim that everything is physical. According to materialism in this strong sense, every individual, every feature it has, and every behavior in which it engages can be described and explained exhaustively using only the conceptual resources of physics. It is possible, in other words, at least in principle, for physics to provide us with descriptions and explanations that leave out nothing but give us the complete story about what there is, what it does, how it does it, and why.
2 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012).
3 Street, Sharon, ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’, Philosophical Studies 127 (2006), 109–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Op. cit., 108–9.
5 Op. cit., 82–3.
6 Neil A. Campbell, Biology, 4th Edition (The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., 1996), 2–4.
7 Jonathan Schaffer, ‘On What Grounds What’, in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, (eds) David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford University Press, 2009), 347–383. Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World (Oxford University Press, 2012).
8 Worrall, John, ‘Structural realism: The best of both worlds?’ Dialectica, 43 (1989), 99–124 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (Oxford University Press, 2007).
9 David Chalmers, ‘Consciousness and Its Place in Nature’, in Philosophy of Mind, (ed.) David J. Chalmers (Oxford University Press, 2002), 258.
10 D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 11.
11 John Heil, The Universe as We Find It (Oxford University Press, 2012), 8.
12 William Bechtel, ‘Reducing Psychology while Maintaining its Autonomy via Mechanistic Explanations’, in The Matter of the Mind, (eds) Maurice Schouten and Looren de Jong, Huib (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 174, 185–186.
13 Kitcher, Philip, ‘1953 and all That: A Tale of Two Sciences’, Philosophical Review 93 (1984), 369 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 373.
14 Scott Camazine, et al., Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton University Press, 2001), 12–13.
15 J. B. S. Haldane, What Is Life? (New York: Boni and Gaer, 1947), 54–56.
16 G. G. Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 113.
17 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1982), 2, 52.
18 Fine, Kit, ‘Things and Their Parts’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23 (1999), 68–79 Google Scholar. Johnston, Mark, ‘Hylomorphism’, Journal of Philosophy 103 (2006), 663–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Jonathan Miller, The Body in Question (New York, NY: Random House, 1978), 140–1.
20 J. Z. Young, An Introduction to the Study of Man (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 86–7.
21 I provide a fuller exposition of the aforementioned notion of structure in Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind: How Hylomorphism Solves the Mind-Body Problem (Oxford University Press, 2016).
22 John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1.
23 Quine, W. V., ‘On What There Is’, Review of Metaphysics 2(1948), 21–38 Google Scholar. Reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953), 1–19.
24 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 173.
25 The idea that the nature of things is revealed not just in description and explanation but in the methods or techniques we use to study them is defended by Hacking in Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1983), and it plays a major role in many of Nancy Cartwright's arguments in The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
26 Op. cit., 652.
27 Dennett, Daniel C., ‘Real Patterns’, Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991), 27–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Op cit., 49.
29 Fodor, Jerry, ‘Special Sciences, or The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’, Synthese 28 (1974), 114 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Dennett, op. cit., 37ff.
31 Another argument to this effect appeals to intertheoretic identities: If theory TA is reducible to theory TB, then TB can take over all the descriptive and explanatory jobs of TA, but this kind of takeover requires that entities postulated by TA be identical to entities postulated by TB ( Sklar, Lawrence, ‘Types of Inter-Theoretic Reduction’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (1967), 109–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schaffner, Kenneth, ‘Approaches to Reduction’, Philosophy of Science 34 (1967), 137–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robert L. Causey, Unity of Science (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1977). According to nonreductive structure antirealists, however, structural and nonstructural discourse are not related in straightforward ways that would allow us to identify structures with nonstructural things. Consequently, nonstructural discourse cannot take over the descriptive and explanatory roles of structural discourse, and hence structural discourse is not reducible to nonstructural discourse.
32 Structure realism should not be confused with structural realism, which is a position in debates about scientific realism (Ladyman and Ross, op cit.). Structural realism claims that scientific theories have structures that remain invariant across instances of theory change. If would-be scientific realists commit themselves only to those structures, say structural realists, and not to the ontologies of particular theories, then realism will be immune to anti-realist arguments that appeal to theory change. This view is altogether different from what I am calling structure realism. Structure realism in the sense I intend is not a position in the scientific realism debate. It is instead defined by its rejection of the assumption the aforementioned three approaches to structure have in common, namely the assumption that everything can be exhaustively described and explained without structure.
33 Gerd Sommerhoff, ‘The Abstract Characteristics of Living Systems’, in Systems Thinking: Selected Readings. F.E. Emery, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 147–8.
34 ‘Hylomorphism’ is a compound of the Greek words hyle and morphe, which are typically translated ‘matter’ and ‘form’ respectively. Because the label is not new it's worth mentioning that the hylomorphic view I have in mind differs from those of Kit Fine, Mark Johnston, David Oderberg, Kathryn Koslicki, Michael Rea, Anna Marmodoro, and Robert Koons. In addition, I cannot vouch for its similarities to those of Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Merleau-Ponty, or the other philosophers whose views have been labeled ‘hylomorphic’. The view is nevertheless very similar to the one Montgomery Furth attributes to Aristotle: ‘[The world] is an Empedoclean, finite three-dimensional mass, entirely filled with the four elements… [W]e now observe that scattered through this three-dimensional mass there are innumerable knots, regions where the matter is elaborately and intricately worked up into an organic unity… highly convoluted but relatively stable eddies in the general commingling-and-separation [of elements]… Aristotle thinks the “principle” called “form” must be brought in on top of the Empedoclean basis, to explain the stability of the knots and the complex specific character that they manifest as long as they last… a material individual (i.e., animal) is… a semipermanent warp or bend informing the local matter, which the matter flows through at various rates during the organism's life history… while the form imposes the continuity…’ (‘Transtemporal Stability in Aristotelian Substances’, Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 638–9Google Scholar).
35 Hilary Putnam, ‘What Is Mathematical Truth?’ in Mathematics, Matter, and Method: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 73.
36 Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 436.
