ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses physicalist reductionism and its ultimate dependence, per the covering law model of causal explanation, on lawlike event regularities connecting all mental states. Physicalist reductionism is the attempt of professional philosophy to translate all mental states into physical states or processes of the brain, thereby eliminating anything from the world that is nonphysical. The chapter rehearses the different approaches that such reductionism has taken from the identity theory and eliminative materialism to the current functionalism, now considered the most promising way to effect the explanatory reduction of mind to material body. This chapter shows how the success of that functionalism is totally dependent on the existence of lawlike event regularities among mental states and ends with Jaegwon Kim’s famous exclusion argument, which draws on the covering law model to exclude all possibility of emergence as traditionally understood.
