Epiphenomenalism and Physicalism

Physicalism, which is often, in contemporary philosophy interchangeably called Materialism, asserts that the physical world, and everything in it conforms to a certain condition, that of being Physical, either as a causal force or as material. The main argument against Physicalism, Jackson’s argument claims that there exists a contradiction between the existence of Qualia (The felt qualities of experience) and Physicalism. Jackson’s argument is given in the form of a thought experiment in which Mary, a neuroscientist, isolated in a black and white room is given all of the physical facts regarding other people, and so must therefore know everything there is to know about other people. However, it is evident in the second premise that because she learns something new about these people upon being released, she must not have known everything there is to know, though the facts she understood hold true, her experience yields new …show more content…
This brings us to the second doctrine avowed by a priori physicalists: the doctrine that psychological sentences like ‘I am in pain’, and ‘Fred is seeing red’ – and if it comes to that, economic sentences like ‘Inflation is in decline’ – when true in our world, are a priori entailed by some suitable conjunction of physical sentences…a priori physicalism, in addition to being committed to the necessitation of the mental by the physical nature of our world, something it shares with a posteriori physicalism by virtue of being reductive in the sense of a ‘no extra properties’ doctrine, avows two a priori necessitation doctrines: one concerns the a priori necessitation of the mental or psychological nature (and the economic nature etc.) of our world by its physical