Reductionism, Supervenience, and Carnap’s Account of Empirical Confirmability

Abstract Rudolf Carnap was one of the earliest proponents of logical positivism/empiricism to explicitly discuss reductionism in relation to mental phenomena from a philosophy of science perspective. In order to address early criticism, Carnap’s account underwent several modifications. An important feature of the ‘mental-to-physical’ reduction endorsed by the later Carnap is that of empirical confirmability. According to this feature, a reduction can only succeed if it carries with it the possibility to confirm or undermine mental claims on the basis of physical claims. Although other modifications of Carnap’s reductionistic account have already been linked to the modern philosophy of mind debate (von Kutschera Erkenntnis 35:305–323, 1991), the role of empirical confirmability in this context remains unexplored terrain. In this paper, we tackle this question and identify relevant modifications in the philosophy of mind with respect to physicalism. We suggest that if one shifts from the metaphysical notion of supervenience to an epistemic derivative of it, one can closely relate supervenience physicalism to Carnap’s account of empirical confirmability. We will show how this both illuminates Carnap’s reductionist program from a philosophy of mind perspective and highlights how the philosophy of mind debate can benefit from Carnap’s account of reduction.