The Problems of Self-Sufficiency and Contentfulness of Physicalism

In its most general sense, contemporary physicalism is a philosophical meta­physical concept concerning the relationship between physical and mental prop­erties, oriented toward physical theories or a worldview associated with physical science. This paper examines the main examples of such relationships (reduc­tion, identity, realization, supervenience) and the associated problems. Histori­cally, physicalism has existed primarily in the form of a linguistic thesis and later as a metaphysical thesis. Metaphysical physicalism is positioned as an approach describing a certain part of reality, while linguistic physicalism is seen as a method of translating statements and theories into the unified language to describe that reality. Based on an analysis of specific examples of physicalist approaches, it is demonstrated that some of the relationships established by physicalism are not specifically physicalist or require decisive support from other approaches. For linguistic physicalism, this function is fulfilled by behaviorism; for the identity theory, by the program of searching for neural correlates; and for most versions of physicalism based on the relation of realization, by functionalism. The only popular example of a self-sufficient version of physicalism turns out to be super­venient physicalism. The analysis leads to two main conclusions: first, that phys­icalism in most of its versions is not an independent explanatory approach, as it always relies on other approaches that play a leading explanatory role in this combination; and second, that physicalism as an independent approach is more of an epistemological or methodological thesis than a linguistic or metaphysical one.