What do you think?
Rate this book
Physical Realization
In Physical Realization, Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Physicalism requires that the mental properties of a person are "realized in" the physical properties of that person, and that all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects are realized in microphysical states of affairs. Shoemaker offers an account of both these sorts of realization, one which allows the realized properties to be causally efficacious. He also explores the implications of this account for a wide range of metaphysical issues, including the nature of persistence through time, the problem of material constitution, the possibility of emergent properties, and the nature of phenomenal consciousness.
- GenresPhilosophyMetaphysics
162 pages, Hardcover
First published July 19, 2007
About the author
Sydney Shoemaker
16 books4 followersSydney Shoemaker is an American philosopher. Until his retirement, he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from Cornell and BA from Reed. In 1971, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University. He has worked primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and has many classic papers in both of these areas (as well as their overlap). In "Functionalism and Qualia" (1975), he argues that functionalism about mental states can account for the qualitative character (or 'raw feel') of mental states. In "Self-Reference and Self-Awareness" (1968), he argues that the phenomenon of absolute 'Immunity to Error Through Misidentification' is what distinguishes self-attributions of mental states (such as "I see a canary") from self-attributions of physical states (such as "I weigh 200 pounds"). In metaphysics, he has defended the view that laws are metaphysically necessary, a position that follows from his view of properties as clusters of conditional causal powers. He has also applied his view of properties to the problem of mental causation. He also has distinguished contributions to the literature on self-knowledge and personal identity, where he defended a Lockean psychological continuity theory in his influential paper "Persons and their Pasts". In his recent work on the content of perception, he has argued for a distinctive version of internalist representationalism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2022
Star Trek NG and Doctor Who fans may enjoy this, the last book that I am aware of by philosopher Sydney Shoemaker before he retired. It covers some of the seminal metaphysical questions of Doctor Who's relationship between mind and body, and has a section debating whether Commander Data is in fact phenomenally conscious.
What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Well, if you remember your school studies, Descartes was very careful to distinguish the mind from matter, that mind or the soul was comprised of non-physical "substance" that could effect the physical. This has become known as Dualism. Centuries later, this basic philosophical idea has informed how we practice modern psychiatry, and even medicine in general. But Sydney Shoemaker, who is a "Physicalist," believes that the relation between the mental and the physical is
one of realization. Realization is the term used by philosophers to denote a dependent realtionship between higher order properties and lower order properties--the lower order causes the higher order to be "real." Shoemaker is one of those philosophers that believes physical properties realize mental properties, and ONLY in that order. In fact, he believes that multiple different physical properties can realize the same mental property. As a psychiatrist, this has potentially profound implications for my profession, as well as for what I was raised to believe as a matter of faith in an immortal soul, so this is a book that I will need to chew on for years to come.
In his groundbreaking book "Physical Realization," Sydney Shoemaker argues that all mental properties, including phenomenally conscious properties that feature in our cognitive activities, are realized in microphysical states of affairs or properties. To better understand what this means, substitute "mental properties" for cognitive capacities or functions, such as being in pain or remembering. Then replace the "microphysical states of affairs" or the realizing physical properties, with neurophysiological processes and neurologic networks in the brain. Then you get closer to what Shoemaker is saying--he is trying to prove how the mind is entirely dependent on activity of the nervous system of an organism, and he hopes his metaphysical framework holds true no matter what new discoveries we may find in the field of neuroscience. This book is to Shoemaker what "The Critique of Pure Reason" was to Kant, as he incorporates over 19 years of work in this one rather short volume that sometimes contradicts what he has said in his earlier publications, refining his theories into a potential revolution in the metaphysics of mind.
So does he succeed?
First let me preface my thoughts by saying that I am a reader who is deeply interested in metaphysics, but I'm not a professional philosopher. So this review is based purely on what I got out of the book as informed by my limited understanding of the vast body of work in this field.
With that out of the way, I would say that Shoemaker makes a compelling argument for several central tenants as spelled out in this book. In particular, I was fascinated by his discussion on how it is possible in principle for two persons to occupy the same body, and this has caused me to rethink cases of dissociative personality with a fresh and invigorated perspective.
And then there were moments where I wasn't so impressed. I don't know enough about the mind-body debate to align myself squarely with dualism (that mind is made of separate non-physical properties while body is the physical structures and properties of the organism) or with physicalism (that there is no separate soul or mind--these phenomena are produced entirely by physical properties of the subject organism). So though I am not a card-carrying physicalist, I think Shoemaker falters in making the case that causal power-endowing emergent microstructural properties are compatible with physicalism, which I will explain later, though in the end it doesn't mean his ideas are not valid.
I also think that his distinction between "thick properties" and "thin properties" is useful in talking about coincident objects, or the "careers" of the person vs. the body. Thick properties are those possessed only by things that have a certain sortal property and thin properties are of things with no specific sortal property. A sortal is something that can be counted, (can take numbers as modifiers), though this is not the only criterion, and can also be used with a definite or indefinite article. So "pickle" is a sortal in the sentence "I want a pickle with my burger," but "water" is not a sortal when we say "I want water." In this case, the sortal being referred to is a person. I suppose that Shoemaker is saying here that thick properties are what gives a person that sense of psychological continuity over time.
If multiple physical properties with different (but coinciding) causal profiles can realize the same mental property, this means that the Identity theory (that mental properties are identical to physical properties) is false. "The relation between a (mental) property instance and its microphysical realizer is constitution, not identity," Shoemaker says. I am assuming by "microphysical realizer" that he means the neural correlates of mind, the most basic of physical events that take place in the brain--nocioreceptors transmitting information via gateway potentials to C-fibers and A-delta fibers along the spinal cord to the thalamus to "realize" the conscious experience of pain. Or perhaps there are even more basic microphysical states of affairs that neuroscience has yet to uncover. Either way, Shoemaker's model of properties should work no matter what the basic units of mental experience. And if he IS right that mental properties aren’t physical, then mental states such as believing it will rain, falling in love, feeling pain, getting depressed, and thinking about the nature of God or this complicated book, are all physically realized.
But he does not say that the powers of mental properties are inherited from the powers of those physical
properties. In fact, mental properties can be said to cause certain effects just as much as physical properties can. Specifically, physical
properties realize mental properties, in that the powers which individuate mental
properties are a proper subset of the powers that are characteristic of certain physical
properties with which those mental properties correlate. Whew!
Though Shoemaker seems to be trying to defend physicalism in his attempts to apply this thesis to the mind-body problem, this book has been criticized for being incompatible with physicalism. It appears Shoemaker made a few mistakes, such as including the idea of "backward-looking" causal powers as being able to differentiate, and thus being able to characterize, properties. I can see how this is ontologically redundant, and since the publication of this book, he has gone back to asserting that properties can be fully characterized in terms of their forward-looking properties.
His subset theory that mental properties are parts of physical properties creates another problem for physicalism. Physicalism holds that the basic units of mental life are physical units, but here Shoemaker seems to be saying the opposite, that physical properties play the role of wholes and that mental properties play the role of parts.
As a result, this book has garnered some nasty comments from peers, such as Michael Starks calling it "nonsense on stilts." Ah, you philosophers. Always nitpicking each other. Debate is certainly healthy, and it is how philosophy advances, but our empirical science is not and may never be so complete as to fill in the blanks that philosophy fills. And science itself requires a great deal of belief and faith. Therefore, when I encounter such "intellectuals" referring to the work of others as "nonsense on stilts," my immediate reaction is to dismiss these opinions as prideful, lacking self-awareness, and unhelpful to the advancement of knowledge.
I personally can't be convinced Shoemaker is completely wrong unless someone shows me some empirical evidence that cognitive functions do not in fact work in the way he outlines. A philosopher might tell me that this is impossible, that these are matters of stipulation and logic, not empiricism. But I say that since neuroscience, especially cognitive neuroscience, concerns itself with linking mind and brain, the findings of neuroscience are prima facie relevant to the discussion. Some might argue that neuroscience does support some of Shoemaker's work. As I mentioned before, one of the criticisms of this book is that Shoemaker cannot get around the problem of overdetermination. Shoemaker doesn't deny this, and says there are degrees of overdetermination that are acceptable, using the example of a firing squad where the bullet of only one soldier lands the fatal shot. One could say the firing squad and the single bullet killed the condemned. I buy that. But I believe it also because I know that overdetermination is found throughout biology--different nucleotide sequences encode the same proteins, for example. Similarly, in yeast, you can knock out a single gene in over 500 loci and still not cause quantifiable defects in the organism. Neural wiring and connections seem to have multiple redundancies. Science is providing confirmation of philosophic hypotheses all the time. So just as there has been recent evidence of "mirror" neurons in monkeys that point to the accuracy of Heinz Kohut's ideas about how the self operates, I have confidence that the more we learn about the brain through techniques like fMRI and lesion studies, the better we'll be able to map the branches of the complex tree that is multiple realization of mental properties. Of course, that doesn't take into account the variability between the neuroanatomy of different brains, a whole other complication to this puzzle.
Perhaps the real cause of some of the discord surrounding the book is not so much what Shoemaker thinks but because, well, academics tend to be a little aspie. The nature of their work requires them to think digitally. Therefore, they are susceptible to alliances into camps and schools. If one group of philosophers come to the conclusion the answer is "zero" and another group thinks the answer is "one," it is damned hard to convince any of them the answer may be somewhere between. Psychotherapists and psychiatrists are just as bad. There are Jungians and Kleinians and Freudians and on and on. Similarly, there are dualist and monist therapists--some reject dualism because they see it as not "holistic." That's interpreting dualism as an artificial separation of the mental and physical, but my understanding is that dualism focuses on the relationship between mind and body just as much or more as any philosophy that believes personhood can be explained away by firing neurons or found in any "suitably organized system." Therefore, a dualist or monist framework has nothing to do with being holistic or not holistic in my opinion.
Shoemaker was not digital. He remained interested in that relationship between the physical and the mental, and even though he was quite advanced in years at the time of writing this book, he was still changing his mind, no pun intended, because he remained open to new ideas and evidence.
This may irritate digital thinkers who have concluded that Shoemaker didn't support physicalism "enough." Well, maybe he didn't, but he certainly wasn't "allowing the mental properties of a subject to float free from its physical properties." Perhaps Shoemaker's biggest mistake was asserting (quite often) that he was trying to support the physicalist perspective in the first place. So what? As a physician, I can believe mental properties are multiply realizable by physical properties, thus making the mental dependent on the physical, but I can also believe mental and physical properties are not one in the same, but intimately related. Physicalists can't and don't discuss mental and physical properties as identical anyway. Descartes may never have been able to explain just what was the relationship between the mind and the human animal, but Shoemaker dedicated his life to rehearsing the solution while knowing he could not reduce the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" down simply to matter organized according to the laws of a completed physics, as David Lewis might have suggested. Shoemaker has carried with him the conviction that, even though every human person (what makes you YOU) coincides with some human body (the animal matrix of cells), no human person is identical with any human body. The body may even outlast the person. As a corpse.
So the physicalists who cringe at the idea of any quasi-spiritual or theology talk in their metaphysics can rest assured Shoemaker is not going there, at least not in this life. He just doesn't reduce persons to material simples. He is not so much defending physicalism, but rather the neo-Lockean perspective. At our most fundamental level, Shoemaker is not saying we are body-soul complexes like Richard Swinburn (another philosopher I hope to be reading very soon), but that we are persons materially constituted by, though NOT identical with, animals. Needless to say, that is not something a dualist necessarily wants to hear, let alone THIS person who does have faith that we are more than just a set of realized properties.
But regardless of where you stand on the mind-body debate, this is a fascinating book. As you can see, this is a highly technical work, and will be a difficult read even for professional philosophers, let alone a guy like me who simply has a deep curiosity about the mind and the soul. I won't argue that there is no soul running the show, at least not in Washington DC, or on cable news, or in executive board rooms of mega-corporations, but the problem of mental causation remains. So if you've got that burning itch like I do, or if you work in the philosophy of mind, you'll be happy you put in the effort to read this volume.
What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Well, if you remember your school studies, Descartes was very careful to distinguish the mind from matter, that mind or the soul was comprised of non-physical "substance" that could effect the physical. This has become known as Dualism. Centuries later, this basic philosophical idea has informed how we practice modern psychiatry, and even medicine in general. But Sydney Shoemaker, who is a "Physicalist," believes that the relation between the mental and the physical is
one of realization. Realization is the term used by philosophers to denote a dependent realtionship between higher order properties and lower order properties--the lower order causes the higher order to be "real." Shoemaker is one of those philosophers that believes physical properties realize mental properties, and ONLY in that order. In fact, he believes that multiple different physical properties can realize the same mental property. As a psychiatrist, this has potentially profound implications for my profession, as well as for what I was raised to believe as a matter of faith in an immortal soul, so this is a book that I will need to chew on for years to come.
In his groundbreaking book "Physical Realization," Sydney Shoemaker argues that all mental properties, including phenomenally conscious properties that feature in our cognitive activities, are realized in microphysical states of affairs or properties. To better understand what this means, substitute "mental properties" for cognitive capacities or functions, such as being in pain or remembering. Then replace the "microphysical states of affairs" or the realizing physical properties, with neurophysiological processes and neurologic networks in the brain. Then you get closer to what Shoemaker is saying--he is trying to prove how the mind is entirely dependent on activity of the nervous system of an organism, and he hopes his metaphysical framework holds true no matter what new discoveries we may find in the field of neuroscience. This book is to Shoemaker what "The Critique of Pure Reason" was to Kant, as he incorporates over 19 years of work in this one rather short volume that sometimes contradicts what he has said in his earlier publications, refining his theories into a potential revolution in the metaphysics of mind.
So does he succeed?
First let me preface my thoughts by saying that I am a reader who is deeply interested in metaphysics, but I'm not a professional philosopher. So this review is based purely on what I got out of the book as informed by my limited understanding of the vast body of work in this field.
With that out of the way, I would say that Shoemaker makes a compelling argument for several central tenants as spelled out in this book. In particular, I was fascinated by his discussion on how it is possible in principle for two persons to occupy the same body, and this has caused me to rethink cases of dissociative personality with a fresh and invigorated perspective.
And then there were moments where I wasn't so impressed. I don't know enough about the mind-body debate to align myself squarely with dualism (that mind is made of separate non-physical properties while body is the physical structures and properties of the organism) or with physicalism (that there is no separate soul or mind--these phenomena are produced entirely by physical properties of the subject organism). So though I am not a card-carrying physicalist, I think Shoemaker falters in making the case that causal power-endowing emergent microstructural properties are compatible with physicalism, which I will explain later, though in the end it doesn't mean his ideas are not valid.
I also think that his distinction between "thick properties" and "thin properties" is useful in talking about coincident objects, or the "careers" of the person vs. the body. Thick properties are those possessed only by things that have a certain sortal property and thin properties are of things with no specific sortal property. A sortal is something that can be counted, (can take numbers as modifiers), though this is not the only criterion, and can also be used with a definite or indefinite article. So "pickle" is a sortal in the sentence "I want a pickle with my burger," but "water" is not a sortal when we say "I want water." In this case, the sortal being referred to is a person. I suppose that Shoemaker is saying here that thick properties are what gives a person that sense of psychological continuity over time.
If multiple physical properties with different (but coinciding) causal profiles can realize the same mental property, this means that the Identity theory (that mental properties are identical to physical properties) is false. "The relation between a (mental) property instance and its microphysical realizer is constitution, not identity," Shoemaker says. I am assuming by "microphysical realizer" that he means the neural correlates of mind, the most basic of physical events that take place in the brain--nocioreceptors transmitting information via gateway potentials to C-fibers and A-delta fibers along the spinal cord to the thalamus to "realize" the conscious experience of pain. Or perhaps there are even more basic microphysical states of affairs that neuroscience has yet to uncover. Either way, Shoemaker's model of properties should work no matter what the basic units of mental experience. And if he IS right that mental properties aren’t physical, then mental states such as believing it will rain, falling in love, feeling pain, getting depressed, and thinking about the nature of God or this complicated book, are all physically realized.
But he does not say that the powers of mental properties are inherited from the powers of those physical
properties. In fact, mental properties can be said to cause certain effects just as much as physical properties can. Specifically, physical
properties realize mental properties, in that the powers which individuate mental
properties are a proper subset of the powers that are characteristic of certain physical
properties with which those mental properties correlate. Whew!
Though Shoemaker seems to be trying to defend physicalism in his attempts to apply this thesis to the mind-body problem, this book has been criticized for being incompatible with physicalism. It appears Shoemaker made a few mistakes, such as including the idea of "backward-looking" causal powers as being able to differentiate, and thus being able to characterize, properties. I can see how this is ontologically redundant, and since the publication of this book, he has gone back to asserting that properties can be fully characterized in terms of their forward-looking properties.
His subset theory that mental properties are parts of physical properties creates another problem for physicalism. Physicalism holds that the basic units of mental life are physical units, but here Shoemaker seems to be saying the opposite, that physical properties play the role of wholes and that mental properties play the role of parts.
As a result, this book has garnered some nasty comments from peers, such as Michael Starks calling it "nonsense on stilts." Ah, you philosophers. Always nitpicking each other. Debate is certainly healthy, and it is how philosophy advances, but our empirical science is not and may never be so complete as to fill in the blanks that philosophy fills. And science itself requires a great deal of belief and faith. Therefore, when I encounter such "intellectuals" referring to the work of others as "nonsense on stilts," my immediate reaction is to dismiss these opinions as prideful, lacking self-awareness, and unhelpful to the advancement of knowledge.
I personally can't be convinced Shoemaker is completely wrong unless someone shows me some empirical evidence that cognitive functions do not in fact work in the way he outlines. A philosopher might tell me that this is impossible, that these are matters of stipulation and logic, not empiricism. But I say that since neuroscience, especially cognitive neuroscience, concerns itself with linking mind and brain, the findings of neuroscience are prima facie relevant to the discussion. Some might argue that neuroscience does support some of Shoemaker's work. As I mentioned before, one of the criticisms of this book is that Shoemaker cannot get around the problem of overdetermination. Shoemaker doesn't deny this, and says there are degrees of overdetermination that are acceptable, using the example of a firing squad where the bullet of only one soldier lands the fatal shot. One could say the firing squad and the single bullet killed the condemned. I buy that. But I believe it also because I know that overdetermination is found throughout biology--different nucleotide sequences encode the same proteins, for example. Similarly, in yeast, you can knock out a single gene in over 500 loci and still not cause quantifiable defects in the organism. Neural wiring and connections seem to have multiple redundancies. Science is providing confirmation of philosophic hypotheses all the time. So just as there has been recent evidence of "mirror" neurons in monkeys that point to the accuracy of Heinz Kohut's ideas about how the self operates, I have confidence that the more we learn about the brain through techniques like fMRI and lesion studies, the better we'll be able to map the branches of the complex tree that is multiple realization of mental properties. Of course, that doesn't take into account the variability between the neuroanatomy of different brains, a whole other complication to this puzzle.
Perhaps the real cause of some of the discord surrounding the book is not so much what Shoemaker thinks but because, well, academics tend to be a little aspie. The nature of their work requires them to think digitally. Therefore, they are susceptible to alliances into camps and schools. If one group of philosophers come to the conclusion the answer is "zero" and another group thinks the answer is "one," it is damned hard to convince any of them the answer may be somewhere between. Psychotherapists and psychiatrists are just as bad. There are Jungians and Kleinians and Freudians and on and on. Similarly, there are dualist and monist therapists--some reject dualism because they see it as not "holistic." That's interpreting dualism as an artificial separation of the mental and physical, but my understanding is that dualism focuses on the relationship between mind and body just as much or more as any philosophy that believes personhood can be explained away by firing neurons or found in any "suitably organized system." Therefore, a dualist or monist framework has nothing to do with being holistic or not holistic in my opinion.
Shoemaker was not digital. He remained interested in that relationship between the physical and the mental, and even though he was quite advanced in years at the time of writing this book, he was still changing his mind, no pun intended, because he remained open to new ideas and evidence.
This may irritate digital thinkers who have concluded that Shoemaker didn't support physicalism "enough." Well, maybe he didn't, but he certainly wasn't "allowing the mental properties of a subject to float free from its physical properties." Perhaps Shoemaker's biggest mistake was asserting (quite often) that he was trying to support the physicalist perspective in the first place. So what? As a physician, I can believe mental properties are multiply realizable by physical properties, thus making the mental dependent on the physical, but I can also believe mental and physical properties are not one in the same, but intimately related. Physicalists can't and don't discuss mental and physical properties as identical anyway. Descartes may never have been able to explain just what was the relationship between the mind and the human animal, but Shoemaker dedicated his life to rehearsing the solution while knowing he could not reduce the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" down simply to matter organized according to the laws of a completed physics, as David Lewis might have suggested. Shoemaker has carried with him the conviction that, even though every human person (what makes you YOU) coincides with some human body (the animal matrix of cells), no human person is identical with any human body. The body may even outlast the person. As a corpse.
So the physicalists who cringe at the idea of any quasi-spiritual or theology talk in their metaphysics can rest assured Shoemaker is not going there, at least not in this life. He just doesn't reduce persons to material simples. He is not so much defending physicalism, but rather the neo-Lockean perspective. At our most fundamental level, Shoemaker is not saying we are body-soul complexes like Richard Swinburn (another philosopher I hope to be reading very soon), but that we are persons materially constituted by, though NOT identical with, animals. Needless to say, that is not something a dualist necessarily wants to hear, let alone THIS person who does have faith that we are more than just a set of realized properties.
But regardless of where you stand on the mind-body debate, this is a fascinating book. As you can see, this is a highly technical work, and will be a difficult read even for professional philosophers, let alone a guy like me who simply has a deep curiosity about the mind and the soul. I won't argue that there is no soul running the show, at least not in Washington DC, or on cable news, or in executive board rooms of mega-corporations, but the problem of mental causation remains. So if you've got that burning itch like I do, or if you work in the philosophy of mind, you'll be happy you put in the effort to read this volume.
August 3, 2017
Good overall account of Shoemaker's position, but I have quarrels about the various simplifications regarding his take on realization. I think that the book's greatest merit is the dialogue with Kim, whose "Physicalism or Something Near Enough" makes for a nice companion.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews