reductive physicalism

Jaegwon Kim (1934-2019) was a contemporary Korean-American philosopher whose research was on the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This paper undertakes an evaluative examination and critique of his stance on the matter of mental causation. Kim's viewpoint on mental causation is based on reductive physicalism. This is how mental events become causally effective through the functional reduction of physical properties. He rejects physicalism's non-reductive reading. And, he believes, it involves the problem of over-determination. In his point of view, mental states can have causal power if their neuro-physical causes have such properties. Within the framework of the Canonical formulation of mental causation, the phenomenon of causal over-determination results in a diminished degree of causal efficacy associated with mental properties. Kim endeavors to expound his conceptualization of mental causation by elucidating notions such as the principle of causal exclusion, causation construed as production and closure principles. The author endeavors to evince the plausibility of mental causality. We argue that (1) supervening mental properties on physical properties makes mental properties to be an epiphenomenon. (2) The Causal Exclusion Argument inadequately preserves the presence of mental properties while simultaneously failing to provide a sufficient rejoinder to the concerns posited by the Generalization Argument. (3) The independency of mental properties from physical properties, and considering them as nomological, are incompatible with each other; and (4) reading causation as production contradicts physics' fundamental laws.

In the division of theories of the philosophy of mind, all kinds of physicalists, whether reductionist or non-reductionist, are considered Monist; because they believe in the physicality of everything. Reductionist physicists, on the other hand, believe that in addition to knowing everything as physical, everything can be reduced to lower levels of physics; But non-reductionists in physicalism, although they consider everything to be physical, believe that in the field of physics we are confronted with "emergent" things that cannot be reduced to the fundamental particles of physics and given a microphysical explanation of Have them; Because we are basically dealing with something new; But "property dualism", by acknowledging the non-physical nature of mental features, believes in two kinds of things in the universe and, as a result, has fundamentally rejected both Monist physicalist theories. Moreover, although in feature dualism, as in non-reductionist physicalism, we encounter a genus of non-reductionism and novelty, non-reductionism and novelty in property dualism are "species" and "species," respectively. Is "fundamental", not "typical" and "superficial". The present article prevents further sputum by clarifying the exact boundaries of the dualistic nature of property with physicalism, especially its non-reductionist type.