[This follows up on Mathew's post on the Draper collection below.] I thought I might say that I had the same kinds of discussion with Melnyk as Goetz and Taliaferro did when I took a Phil Mind seminar with him while doing my MA. He was my first philosophical mentor in analytic philosophy and one of my philosophical heroes, still one of the few atheists I've ever met (maybe the only) who's intellectual and personal virtues combined with his erudition (in general and on the subject of the existence of God (the man has read his Swinburne I promise you)) made me want to think harder about my reasons for belief.
However, I was quite surprised that he offers the kind of inductive argument that he does and that he gave such short shrift to the problem of free will. Goetz and Taliaferro response is almost identical to what I said in class: he just ignores the *data*. The inductive argument is further flawed by considerations pertaining to reference classes and I've had long-term goals to make this as clear as possible that my work with Kyburg has helped me on.
I'll continue discussion below the fold.
The essence of it, though, is just as Goetz and Taliaferro say: there is such a huge disanalogy between the mental phenomena and the phenomena Melnyk adverts to. He lists the following areas of successful reduction: chemical, biochemical, cell-biological, histological, physiological, geological, meteorological, and astronomical. Now perhaps people used to think of the chemical as non-physical, I don't know but I doubt it given what I know about alchemy in the middle ages. As for the other categories, no relatively modern person--since, say, Bacon (Francis, not Roger)--could take too seriously for long the idea that they are not physical, yet *plenty* of such people (by far the majority) continue to see mental phenomena as vastly different from physical phenomena. (And there's no discussion of free will in his A Physicalist Manifesto.) (This has been noted in reviews of Andrew's book by both Hawley and Witmer))
It is *not impressive* (in the right sort of way) that all those categories have been "unified" by having been found to be physical or physically realized. It's as if I tried to make some kind of counter-argument to the effect that since mathematical thoughts, historical thoughts, thoughts about myself, acts of choice, subjectivity, abstract reasoning, and sensuous experience were all non-physical then, probably, all thinks are non-physical. I'd never make that argument (even though I accept the premises) because there's such a prima facie difference of kind between the items on that list and the items on Andrew's list. (And if you haven't read it, here's evidence I'm not going overboard: "Consider an analogous case: the discovery that all noncarnivorous plants are biochemically realized is clearly some evidence that all plants, including therefore all carnivorous ones, are biochemically realized." He admits he uses naive enumerative induction based on Nicod's Criterion even though that has been soundly discredited.)
Aristotle seemed to think that astronomical objects weren't composed of the same stuff as terrestrial objects (as I recall, I know next to nothing about it) but I think this is probably a technical point unrelated to the kinds of considerations which cause the vast majority of us to think of mental and physical phenomena as insurmountably disparate (in a way that Cartesians and Thomists have in common). Subjectivity is different from physicality in a way that is much more profound than the way in which liquidity seems separate from chemical make-up.
It's interesting, too, that he doesn't put "biological" in his list. Perhaps he thinks this covered by a combination of the others, but that's controversial. From my perspective it is far from clear that there are no emergent biological laws. It is also important that "sociological" and "economic" don't appear on his list.
I wish they would have said more about this. It is interesting to me that in the years since I had these conversations with Melnyk the arguments have not improved one bit. The Unity of Sciences argument might work fine for physicalism taken as an attitude, but it's a terrible argument for the truth of physicalism. This is something I plan to try to dismantle piece by piece. The above, of course, is just the barest, briefest splay I can give at my current level of productivity. Lord willing I'll have years to draw it all out. In the mean time I heartily endorse (the bulk of) Goetz and Taliaferro's excellent reply.
I think the choice of combatants on this subject couldn't have been better (and in the case of Melnyk it might not have been possible for it to have been otherwise at any rate, when I helped Andrew organize an international conference on physicalism we basically couldn't get anyone on the planet to defend physcialism (I mean actually defend it as *true*, like with arguments). There had been hopes that it would be a conference on the evidential status of physicalism, it was later changed to "Current Issues about Physicalism" (I just went to get this link to the photos of the conference I was shocked to learn that the name has been retrospectively (and mistakenly) changed back to "The Evidential Status of Physicalism" I'm the one who made the schedule and there was virtually nothing on the evidential status of physicalism (maybe Loewer's paper "Why is there anything except physics" but it wasn't any kind of defense of physicalism).
At this point I can't resist ending with the following anecdote. When the Manifesto came out, I noted that on Cambridge University Press's webpage for the book there was blurb from Michael Tye saying "'This is unquestionably the best elucidation and defense of physicalism as a general world view ever produced by a philosopher.'" [I could have sworn it originally read "..since Lucrtious".] I popped into Andrew's office shortly thereafter and mentioned this to him. His reply came back in the driest Oxford accent: "Indeed, well I'm about the *only* philosopher to defend physicalism, so I won't let it go to my head!"
I wonder if it's at all relevant to note that in order to reduce the chemical, biochemical, cell-biological, histological, physiological, geological, meteorological, and astronomical to the physical, our understanding of what the physical is like had to undergo a lot of shifts. It's not clear that there is a common core under the shifting views of the physical (compare atomism with quantum field theory). The best I can do for a common core is the physical as non-mental, but that won't help him (sunsets are non-mental, cells are non-mental, hence beliefs are non-mental), or law-governed, which the mental not unlikely is, too.