Abstract

My thesis is a study in the ontology of psychology, and in particular the status of the entities it is willing to countenance vis-a-vis the physical sciences. The overriding theme which guides the present work is that psychology is an autonomous discipline, autonomous not only in the sense that it utilizes its own distinctive concepts and classification schemes, but in the much stronger sense that it has its own distinct and irreducible ontology which sets it apart from the physical sciences. In a work, psychology is metaphysically autonomous. ;To this end I distinguish three kinds of physicalism which may be thought to constrain the ontology of psychological theory--type physicalism, token physicalism, and physicalism as supervenience--and criticize each in turn. The first is the topic for chapters 1 and 2, where I present and defend the multiple realizability argument, strengthening its case by taking into account the more important criticisms which can be found in the literature, for example, Kim's appeal to physical multiple realizations, infinite disjunctive properties, and species-specific laws. Then, in chapters 3 and 4, I critically evaluate token physicalism, first by showing the connection between token identities and the individuation of events, and then by showing that such token identities rest on an implausible theory of events. ;The most recent trend in the philosophy of mind, however, is to move away from identity theories altogether and embrace a view which I have called physicalism as supervenience. The basic idea is that psycho-physical dependencies are to be understood in terms of a supervenience relation, according to which physical events determine mental events, independent of questions about type or token identities. But this too is a mistake. While I do think there are exceptions to supervenience, my main point in chapter 5 is that psychophysical supervenience is too weak a relation to capture physicalist intuitions. ;What should become apparent, I hope, is that the autonomy of psychology is neither exceptional nor an exceptional fact. Indeed, other sciences like biology are likewise autonomous relative to more basic physical theories, and some of the arguments I give are easily extended to the case of other scientific disciplines. Hence the present study is relevant not only to traditional philosophic concerns over mind and body, but also carries implications for those disputes in the philosophy of science concerning inter-theoretic reductions and the traditional unity of science