ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that students’ and scholars’ moderate, empirically oriented variety of physicalism is up to the job. It provides an effective means of solving the core conundrum of physicalism: how to acknowledge the apparent plurality of entities in the world exposed by the special sciences while at the same time remain true to an austere ontology. Epistemic arguments against physicalism are premised on precisely a presumed lack of explanation of the relationship of consciousness to physical entitles and processes. The chapter develops the notion of compositional explanation and use it to distinguish between naturalistic explanations that are compatible with the research program as a form of physicalism and those that are not. Physicalism succeeds when all putatively existing non-physical phenomena are fitted in the physical world. The chapter highlights a number of key features of compositional explanations. Compositional explanations involve relations that are asymmetric. Compositional relations hold between entities that are synchronous to each other.
