ABSTRACT
Attempts to delineate genuine versions of physicalism from ersatz or imitation ones often fail to acknowledge the variety of views that have been presented as physicalist. There are identity, supervenience, a priori entailment, realization, Grounding, truthmaking, and part-whole definitions of physicalism. Once both physicalism and its competitors are conceived of as research programs, there is no difficulty in distinguishing between research program physicalism, dualism, Russellian monism, and emergentism. Compositional explanation liberates physicalism from its metaphysical and epistemological shackles and renders it continuous with scientific practice. Indeed, all of these competing programs are competitors because they are not committed to offering compositional explanations of all natural phenomena. For dualism, consciousness will never be physically explained. Instead, the authors treat physicalism as an ongoing interdisciplinary project that strives to explain natural phenomena in a manner that makes explicit how they arise out of and are nothing over and above physical entities.
