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Topic: Reductive materialism

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	Materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.
		Materialism is sometimes allied with the methodological principle of reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description -- typically, a more general level than the reduced one.
		Marxism also uses materialism to refer to the scientific world view, It emphasizes a "materialist conception of history", which is not concerned with metaphysics but centers on the empirical world of actual human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Materialism (964 words)

	Reductive materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Reductive materialism (Identity Theory) claims that there is no independent, autonomous level of phenomena in the world that would correspond to the level of conscious mental states.
		It also states that the level of conscious phenomena is identical with some level of purely neurological description.
		Similar reductions have taken place in the history of science:
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Reductive_materialism (155 words)

	Philosophical Materialism
		So materialism has always inferred its theories from the best empirical evidence at hand and has as a result always had its metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed, because the basic assumption of valid science has also always been that nature is governed by coherent, discoverable physical laws.
		Reductive and eliminative materialism[5] describe the poles of the process known as intertheoretic reduction.
		A successful reduction of this kind was the incorporation and clarification of Newton's laws of motion in Einstein's theory of relativity, or of Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism in quantum theory.
	www.infidels.org /library/modern/richard_vitzthum/materialism.html (5252 words)

	The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism by Z. A. Jordan
		Materialism emphasized the omnipotence of experience, of habit and education, and, generally, the influence of the environment on man. Therefore, progress and virtue require not to be preached, but to be prepared by an appropriate arrangement of social relations.
		Reductive mechanistic materialism is incompatible with Marx’s conception of man as being both determined by and responding to the circumstances, including the physical factors, of his environment, which he moulds and transforms by his action.
		An anti-metaphysical materialism is a contradiction in adiecto, for materialism is a metaphysical doctrine.
	www.marxists.org /reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm (18251 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - materialism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Reduction, construed ontologically, is a relation between two theoretically characterized domains of entities, whether postulated objects, properties, processes, states, events, or laws.
		Compositional materialism implies that physical (and thus, for the physicalist, psychological) events are not typically identical to their smaller constituent features.
		The complex relation between the material substrate and conscious experience is likely to leave the explanation of this relation nontransparent, as it does in other cases of complex phenomena.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/materialism.html (2251 words)

	[No title]
		Materialism ultimately rests on a simplistic view of causality which is inherently biased and conforms to the empirical positivist tradition: namely, psychic reality is that which is directly observable, measurable, and quantifiable, thus constituted as fact.
		This position insists that the human being is, in Aristotelian terminology, the conglomeration of material and efficient causes: mind is caused by the matter or physical substance it is made of as well as causally affected by the material forces that constitute the flux of environmental events.
		While the boon of materialism is scientific, medical, technological, and consequently social advancement, the bane is the demise of the self as a complex integrated whole.
	www.processpsychology.com /new-articles/Materialism2.htm (9309 words)

	Chapter 14
		Finally, when I reflect on mentality and materiality as carefully as I can, I cannot see that the presence of the former logically entails that of the latter, I do not find the least difficulty in conceiving of a being which had all the factors of mentality and none of the factors of materiality.
		Emergent Materialism regards materiality as a "differentiating attribute" in the looser sense, and it regards mentality as an emergent characteristic of certain material aggregates.
		Materialism is supposed to be incompatible with Idealism only because it happens to be associated with a particular view about the actual laws of matter and the actual configuration of matter in the Universe.
	www.ditext.com /broad/mpn/mpn14.html (18359 words)

	IMNotes5.htm
		Reductive materialism has gone out of fashion as a naturalist theory of the mind (although there has been a bit of a revival lately).
		Reductive Materialism claims qualia may be accounted for via the particular sensory vectors that are provided by the sensory equipment.
		Note that Reductive Materialism and Functionalism are alike in many ways, so objections and replies to an objection to the Functionalist position may also apply to Reductive Materialism, and vice versa.
	www.hfac.uh.edu /phil/garson/IMNotes5.htm (3039 words)

	Cross Currents: The pragmatics of spirit: a centenary celebration of James's Varieties - William James, The Varieties ...
		In following a reductive analysis of the human spirit and the attainments of the human spirit, we lose the ability to appreciate the value of the religious dimension of the human person, or for that matter, we lose the ability even to ask the question of the value of this dimension.
		The confidence that James's contemporaries had in reductive theories and the headiness with which they were received are perhaps understandable at that time.
		Materialism undercuts the rationale or motivation for embracing life's discomforts and challenges as opportunities for growth: for example, James writes, "it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers" (285).
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2096/is_3_53/ai_112212951 (1534 words)

	Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind
		This view is known as eliminative materialism, and it has been defended by eminent philosophers such as Paul Churchland and Richard Rorty.
		According to many critics of eliminative materialism (e.g., Daniel Dennett, John Searle, William Lycan), folk psychology is wildly successful at explaining and predicting human behavior.
		It makes much more sense to say that someone got a drink of water because she was thirsty than it does to say someone got a drink of water because the neuro-chemicals in the brain were firing with specific physical properties.
	apologetics.johndepoe.com /naturalism-mind.html (2591 words)

	A Rough Glossary of Some Philosophical Terms
		Most generally, the view that the one basic ontological category is material substance or physical substance (for most of our purposes ‘material’ and ‘physical’ will be used equivalently, though the latter connotes some sort of priviledged status for current scientific methodology, whereas the former does not).
		reductive materialism/identity theory: mental states exist and each (type of) mental state is identical to a specifiable (type of) physical state of the brain; talk of mental states/properties can, in principle, be redefined in terms of talk of brain states/properties; i.e., mental states/properties are reduced to or identical to brain states/properties.
		But making this idea precise is problematic: classical views of the reduction relation between scientific theories are often too restrictive, requiring full translation of one theory into another, true identity claims regarding entities in the reduced and reducing domain, or that the reduced theory be implied by the reducing theory (with additional assumptions).
	classes.colgate.edu /pgregory/glossary.html (1347 words)

	Consciousness [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		Although materialism may not logically rule out immortality or free will, materialists will likely often reply that such traditional, perhaps even outdated or pre-scientific beliefs simply ought to be rejected to the extent that they conflict with materialism.
		Despite the apparent simplicity of materialism, say, in terms of the identity between mental states and neural states, the fact is that there are many different forms of materialism.
		Materialism is true as an ontological or metaphysical doctrine, but facts about the mind cannot be deduced from facts about the physical world (Boyd 1980, Van Gulick 1992).
	www.iep.utm.edu /c/consciou.htm (17645 words)

	Homepage
		Churchland is a Professor of philosophy, and he and his wife Patricia Churchland (who is a well-recognized philosopher in her own right) have made rather a name for themselves in contemporary analytic philosophy as eliminative materialists — which, you will remember, means that they deny the existence of consciousness as a distinct entity.
		Material objects can have dispositional properties, even multitracked ones, so there is no necessity to embrace dualism to make sense of our psychological vocabulary.
		Reductive materialism, more commonly known as the identity theory, is the most straightforward of the several materialist theories of mind.
	www.msu.edu /~marianaj/church.htm (8952 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - physicalism, non-reductive (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Kim's arguments against non-reductive materialism's attempt to have it both ways are valid, and have had a profound impact.
		And as it turns out, bridge laws are simply not to be found when we look at the most successful reductions in the history of science.
		There is clearly some relationship that is established when one theory reduces another, but almost all modern philosophers of science acknowledge that in most cases this relationship is more like an isomorphism or a similarity than an identity (see Bickle 1998, Hooker 1981, Churchland 1975).
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/nonreductivephysicalism.html (1677 words)

	Philosophical basis of Psychological Science, Paul F. Ballantyne
		Oversimplification of what is meant by the terms materialism and idealism, however, has hindered an historically principled assessment of not only these scientific metatheories but also the resultant "systems or schools" of psychological science.
		The traditional forms of reductive naturalism are associated with positivism and mechanistic materialism whereas the progressive form is associated with both functional and dialectical materialism.
		The problem with functional materialism has been that although it is distinctly opposed to both physicalist reduction and to ontological dualism (e.g., mind-body parallelism), it is "not in principle incompatible with [ontological] idealism" (Dubrovskii, 1987, p.
	www.comnet.ca /~pballan/Appendix1.htm (7448 words)

	SELLARS' EPISTEMOLOGY AND MATERIALISM
		Following the lead of Sellars, Emergent Materialism can be characterized as a Materialism which recognizes, in addition to the physical properties (of inanimate "matter") studied by physics, a hierarchy of "emergent" properties {41} to correspond to the sentient aspects of living organisms.
		Sellars' variety of Emergent Materialism, when applied to the study of human beings, can then be seen as requiring the emergence of physical entities, sensa, to correspond to human sense impressions ("raw feels").
		Materialism must be interpreted as the claim that mentalistic concepts can be defined in terms of physicalistic concepts together with concepts of sense qualities, neither of these latter two types being definable in terms of the other.
	www.ditext.com /chrucky/chru-1.html (4922 words)

	[No title]
		Reductive materialism: These thinkers reduce thought to matter, or rather to the physical properties of material substances, either by identifying thought with certain physical structures or motions (e.g.
		According to non-reductive materialists, thought is a property of a material substance, not of a ghostly substance in a material substance.
		Nevertheless, thought is not either identical with a physical motion or structure of any material thing nor is it an effect of such a structure.
	personal.stthomas.edu /jdkronen/lecp14.html (954 words)

	A Rough Glossary of Some Philosophical Terms (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The purely semantic point, which we may call semantic or logical behaviorism, is consistent with dualism and materialism (though most adherents were materialists), and to some extent avoids the ontological problem by not committing on the nature of mental states.
		Type identity theory is an alternate name for reductive materialism.
		reductive materialism/type identity theory: mental states exist and each (type of) mental state is identical to a specifiable (type of) physical state of the brain; talk of mental states/properties can, in principle, be redefined in terms of talk of brain states/properties; i.e., mental states/properties are reduced to or identical to brain states/properties.
	philosophy.wlu.edu /gregoryp/class/fall02/313/glossary.html (1445 words)

	Physicalism, Dualism, and Intellectual Honesty
		By practically all of its proponents physicalism (or materialism; both terms are treated as synonyms in this paper) is held to be the one and only rationally defensible world view.
		But one should resist the reduction of angular triangularities even to those sets, since angular triangularities are straightforward objects of cognition, while those sets certainly are not.
		Nevertheless, they still uphold the names “physicalism” and “materialism” for designating their miscellaneous positions, and still despise “dualism,” which they keep associating with religious obscurantism, alleging, with great emphasis, its anti-scientific nature.
	www.newdualism.org /review/vol1/DR1-1-U.Meixner.htm (7449 words)

	Monism, Dualism, Pluralism
		That is, it is widely assumed that a putative answer to the mind-body problem must describe the metaphysical relationship between mental and physical in terms of the obtaining or otherwise of a certain five metaphysical relations (identity, reduction, realisation, supervenience, and causation).
		Having understood that beliefs* cannot be material objects, Descartes' mistake was to equate them with non-material objects.
		Beliefs* are neither material nor non-material, in just the same sense that universities are neither physical nor non-physical.
	www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au /tgelder/papers/MDP.html (8639 words)

	Secularizing Islam - Reader comments at DanielPipes.org (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		From the viewpoint of the reductive materialist religion is nonsense and the religions are fools.
		The secularists will not be comfortable with religion until they can accept the idea reductive materialism is just one way of viewing reality and the successes of science do not prove it is absolutely and unarguably the only way.
		Unfortunately it is a reaction to the world view of reductive materialism.
	www.danielpipes.org /comments/14552 (445 words)

	AA TOC 101-1 March 1999
		All of the premises of the earlier ecology have since been challenged, and today’s ecologies—symbolic, historical, and political—radically depart from the reductions and elisions of the ecological anthropology of the past.
		In particular, the new ecologies override the dichotomies that informed and enlivened the debates of the past—nature/culture, idealism/materialism—and they are informed by the literature on transnationalist flows and local-global articulations.
		He then distanced himself from both idealism and reductive materialism and set out to understand the complexities of cultural understandings and ritual.
	www.aaanet.org /aa/101-1.htm (2457 words)

	Materialism Encyclopedia Article @ HigherPower.org (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Local Cache Updated: Thu Mar 23 14:18:47 2006
		Some facts may not have been fully verified for accuracy.
		"Materialism" results in these other popular encyclopedia sites:
	higherpower.org /encyclopedia/Materialism (1063 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The course is centred round materialism and its problems.
		We shall look at the background to contemporary theories and the controversies that now surround them.
		Paul Churchland, ‘Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes’.
	www.ceu.hu /phil/MINDsyll_1.htm (153 words)

	Philosophy 400 – Intersections of Science and Religion (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		What is the difference between reductive materialism and non-reductive physicalism?
		Jeeves argues that the brain and the mind are closely connected.
		Brown attempts to argue that the idea of soul should be replaced with concepts of the capacity of the brain?
	www.ulm.edu /~hwilson/Phi400study2.htm (204 words)

	IMMidTStudy.htm
		Explain at least two of the objections to neural net models that Pinker describes.
		What is the main point of difference between Reductive Materialism and Functionalism?
		Discuss in detail four objections to the Reductive Materialist's account of consciousness covered in class.
	www.hfac.uh.edu /phil/garson/IMMidTStudy.htm (661 words)

	Cognitive Science at Montclair State University
		Although the functionalist approach of CRUM can account for the cognitive aspects of emotion, no traditional philosphical position on the relation between mind and body deals adequately with all three aspects of emotion: cognitive, experiential, and physical.
		Experiential Emphasizes Ignores Emphasizes reductive/eliminative materialism Physical Ignores dualism functionalism
		This is the view that CRUM and neuroscience can cooperate in tying together explanations of high-level cognition with experiential phenomena and physical properties of the brain.
	www.chss.montclair.edu /psychology/cogscience/notes9b.html (592 words)

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