Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Why Physicalism is Wrong

Grant Bartley argues that to say the mind is physical is an abuse of language.

The most widely accepted attempt at describing the nature of embodied thought in this materialistic age is called physicalism. (It has a variant called materialism, but I’ll use the terms interchangeably.) There are many nuanced versions of physicalism, but in its basic form, it says that all the mental things – sensations, thoughts, ideas, all experiences – are really physical things: matter, energy and physical processes. But does such an idea make sense? Can it mean anything meaningful to say that the contents of minds are physical? I say no.

Let me start by saying that the debate about how to describe the nature of the mind is at its heart an argument about the proper language in which to do so.

…