but I'll also insist on pointing out that we are a ways from showing such reductions empirically, — Banno

Aye. Though I don't think this is required for physicalism to be true. There existing a reduction to the physical is a much different claim than the existence of a supervenience relation between the physical and another property type. Reduction seems to be a specific type of supervenience, insofar as "X is F iff X is G expresses a bridge law" has "X is F iff X is G" as a constituent, and if that is true then an F change is identical to a G change. It would also be a supervenience relationship the other way around, because also every G change is identical to an F change.

such as anomalous monism - that "perhaps (we) can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour — Banno

Then it would seem anomalous monism, as you've construed it, is consistent with physicalism. Anomalism seems much more tied to the behaviour of reductive explanations than on the dependence of property types upon each other, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality — Banno

If you're speaking about Ratcliffe's account of intentionality, it isn't folk. Folk theory of intention for Ratcliffe consists of equating each intentional state with a propositional attitude. He rejects that theory of intention.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the argument. I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality, but again it is difficult to see how there could be causal links between them. — Banno

You could get causal links without expressing a bridge law maybe. eg taking absurd amounts of testosterone can be a direct cause of violent intrusive thoughts, so "I wanted to kill the person in front of me because I've been injecting a lot of steroids recently" perhaps works. You could also have a really patchy network of reductive explanation connections between property types, with perhaps it being in principle possible to give them, while there being a total connection of property types through the supervenience relation... Even if those supervenience relations don't all point at the physical.

Don't the supervenience relations all point at the physical for Davidson?

Then it would seem anomalous monism, as you've construed it, is consistent with physicalism. — fdrake

Well, yes, it is; hence the "monism"... But I would flip this and say that if monism must be true, then the only possibility is anomalous monism, hence preserving folk psychology.

He rejects that theory of intention. — fdrake

From what I've understood, I'm not in disagreement with Ratcliffe here. If the theory of intention is that intentions are somehow coded into neural networks, I very much doubt it. I don't think it likely that an MRI will one day identify the neural network for "Banno believes tea should be black".

You could get causal links without expressing a bridge law maybe — fdrake

If I've understood this, I'm not sure i'd count such things as casual - wouldn't they be closer to a neural version of "correlation does not imply causation"?

This is all a bit speculative, of course.

Uh, even the Neo-Russelians admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1093/bjps/axl027?journalCode=bjps

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://prce.hu/w/teaching/HitchcockRussell.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjwyqPR48KDAxVEjYkEHbtcCgMQFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3v878Do8RSObSgYqoN9Rpb

And these are the supporters of Russell saying the elimitivism case is DOA (although able to be resurrected in some respects).

This seems relevant since it seems like you are saying that something like Russell's argument is the cause ( :wink: ) for the lack of cause in the sciences? Or physics anyhow. The special sciences are always going on about causation.

Uh, even the Neo-Russelians admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1093/bjps/axl027?journalCode=bjps — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm. I've no access to the article, I'm unable to see any data from the abstract, so why do they "admit that they have a major problem with how much scientists appeal to cause"?

The Hitchcock article makes much the same point I am making.

At the very least we might learn from Anscombe that cause is more than pattern, and acknowledge the place of intention and agency in our casual descriptions.

I mean phenomena in the sense that they are objects that are presented and prepared for scientific work. These objects, however, may be the product of a historical construction, but at some point in their history they are given in an epistemological cut from which they are presented as a category in the process of closure and establishment of sui generis circular relationships. In general, when we try to learn a science that is already historically established and solidified, the objects we learn are also solidly established. These objects are not given to us as something dependent on a more fundamental reality (say, physics) but as sui generis objects, arranged in a body with a certain autonomy and ontological discontinuity with respect to other objects of a different kind. When we learn mathematics we do not learn "the neurochemical composition of numbers", nor is it necessary to do so to access its scientific nature: We access demonstrations, laws, necessary relationships, etc. given in a gnoseological and ultimately ontological discontinuity.

I see what you mean. But what I’m wanting to differentiate is the sensory from the intellectual. Numbers and the like can only be apprehended by a rational intelligence that is capable of counting. It is that faculty which I claim that physicalism cannot meaningfully account for.

(And :100: for the first poster I’ve ever known to use ‘gnoseological’ in a post. :party: )

Sure, it is an account that may sound persuasive to some, but I do appreciate him attempting to sketch out a framework of our mental activity and I do sympathize with his focus on trying to provide an alternative to scientism (which he calls "materialism", which I don't think necessarily follows at all).

I agree—I tend to see 'mind' as a verb not a noun, and I see mental functions as one kind of physical function. The tricky part is that the physical aspects of mental functions are well-hidden from us; we don't so easily feel the physical aspects of mental functions as we might, for example, with digestion. We don't feel our brains, I mean that's why they can be operated on without anaesthetic. — Janus

Very tricky yes. I mean, I agree that at least some important non-mental physical aspects are not felt by us, and obviously some parts of the brain play a role in experience which as parts, are not felt as experience.

But then we do know, from the inside, what a brain is "like" by having experience, given that experience must arise from this organ. The issue is, what parts of it are we experiencing? That's very hard to know at this stage.

Hitchcock does not agree with you. He says Russell's premise re "cause being irrelevant because it is absent from the advanced sciences," (e.g., physics) is demonstrably false and also, not even good grounds for the idea that "cause is unscientific." Go check out where he covers Suppes after Cartwright.

Suppes 1970 writes:

The words ‘causality’ and 'cause’ are commonly and widely used by physicists in their most recent work.

There is scarcely an issue of Physical Review that does not contain at least one article using either ‘cause’ or ‘causality’ in its title. A typical sort of title is that of a recent volume edited by the distinguished physicist, E. P. Wigner, ‘Dispersion relations and their connection with causality’ (1964). Another good example is the recent
article by E. C. Zeeman (1964) ‘Causality implies the Lorentz group.’ The first point I want to establish, then, is that discussions of causality are now very much a
part contemporary physics. (Suppes 1970, pp. 5–6)

Hitchcock writes:

Since Suppes wrote this almost forty years ago, I conducted a quick and unsystematic internet search of the Physical Review journals (a series of 9) from 2000 to 2003 and found 76 articles with ‘cause’, ‘causes’, ‘causality’, or some similar term in the title. Here are the first three examples listed: "Tree Networks with Causal Structure’ (Bialas et al. 2003), Specific-Heat Anomaly Caused by Ferroelectric Nanoregions in Pb(Mg[sub
1/3]Nb<sub>)O and Pb(MgTa)O Relax-ors’ (Moriya et al. 2003) 'Observables’ in causal set cosmology’ (Brightwell et al. 2003)

So Suppes’ observation remains true in 2003.</sub>

And it's easily demonstrable today that "cause" is not absent from the "advanced sciences," if this is to be defined as physics, because it is particularly frequent in discussions of quantum foundations.

So a key premise of Russell's argument, is simply not true. And I've seen other people look back to his era and question if it was ever true, or just something he pronounced without anyone really calling him out on it. After all, that premise mattered less when he advanced his idea a century ago, since the almost 200 year old definition of "the law of causality" as framed by Mill was the key target.

The argument against Mill and Kant is mostly successful. The premises that "cause" is incoherent, and not useful because it is not used in the advanced sciences, is not.

In the bigger picture, it seems like another example of the larger problem that Russell and some of his associates had of thinking that "if I can't understand something or formalize it then it doesn't exist, is a 'pseudo-problem,' or is 'meaningless.'" But the failure of thinkers to produce a widely agreed upon, philosophically adequate explanation of a term cannot entail that it is meaningless, else we have to allow that Dennette is correct and that we cannot be concious due to the lack of a widely agreed upon explanation of the term (and we probably can't meaningfully be communicating in a thing called "language" either, since language would also be "meaningless").

Hitchcock also summarizes why Cartwright and others give us good reason to believe that problems with causation are particularly acute in the most general/universal settings (e.g. cosmology, Russell's original example of gravitation) for epistemic reasons. Whereas these issues tend to be less acute when we can remove observation from the frame of reference, which would explain why cause is much more common in some areas of physics than others, and remains very popular in the special sciences.

I'd just add that pancomputationalism is extremely popular in physics, which has built in a ready made explanation of how past states dictate prior states that could be used to understand cause, granted in a way that doesn't line up with naive views exactly. People advocating for some form of pancomputationalism would include Vedral, Lloyd, Tegmark, Deutsche, Davies, etc.

From what I've understood, I'm not in disagreement with Ratcliffe here. If the theory of intention is that intentions are somehow coded into neural networks, I very much doubt it. I don't think it likely that an MRI will one day identify the neural network for "Banno believes tea should be black". — Banno

AFAIK Ratcliffe's rejection of a folk theory of intention is much different than trying to replace it with neural network behaviour. But that takes us elsewhere.

If I've understood this, I'm not sure i'd count such things as casual - wouldn't they be closer to a neural version of "correlation does not imply causation"? — Banno

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I had imagined a big network, not a neural network, of all different events and properties. Between those events and properties are links. If type X is reducible to type Y, draw an arrow from X to Y. If everything is reducible to the physical, you could travel from every property to the physical properties in that network, following the arrows. That's what "everything reduces to the physical" looks like, it's a network of everything with the physical as a sink, drawing everything in.

Do the same procedure for supervenience. Make a second network. If everything ends up pointing to the physical in that one, that's physicalism.

Those networks don't need to be identical. In fact, the reducible explanation network could be very unconnected - we might just be crap at explaining things in the grand cosmos -, but everything supervenes on the physical regardless.

I take the anomaly in anomalism to be referring to the possible paucity of connections in the explanation network. An event with property type X occurs and it serves as an explanation of property type Y... That doesn't need to happen with most pairs of property types. But also it can happen with any pair. Making the network of explanations look patchy, but potentially can be filled in. Whereas you can draw a line to the physical from any starting point in the network of supervenience.

If you are a physicalist, what convinced you? Or is it just the grounding of your thinking? — frank

I would posit myself as a physicalist emergentist. What type is still up in the air since that's a realm depending on yet unproven scientific theories.

The reason is simply that it has the most verifiable evidence in science, which in turn is arguably the best way for humans to form conclusions about anything. If we have a gradient between pure abstract fantasy and hard rigorous facts, then it doesn't matter if someone tries to argue for something like "brain in a vat" since it only produce an "anything goes" scenario that renders philosophy and reality totally meaningless to even pursue. Even with such a possibility we are required to form a framework that functions for our thinking, something that we can both theoretically handle and practically apply. And that means turning down the side of the gradient that leans towards abstract fantasy and turn up the gradient closer to hard rigorous facts. In essence, in order to even begin to think about the world and try to explain anything, we require a framework for which we operate in. And since the most effective and functioning framework is science, then we might be required to operate in physicalist emergentism as its the the realm of thinking that is closest to the evidence found in science.

Other theories quickly falls back into abstract fantasies. Most often related to a sort of arrogance of our species, putting humanity on an arbitrary pedestal because of our ego and extrapolating metaphysical concepts out of it. This egocentric framework generates everything from detaching consciousness from reality and religious claims. But there's very little evidence for any of those frameworks other than the pure will of our ego to put ourselves in the center of the universe. Forming a rational and logical explanation of reality requires a detachment from ourselves and our ego, we must kill our ego before analyzing reality, otherwise we apply all sorts of emotional and arbitrary values to a subject before even attempting to theorize about it. And we are utterly irrational, emotional beings with so many instinctual tendencies that guide our biases that we absolutely, brutally, must kill our ego before trying to explain anything. Or else we doom ourselves to be just as irrational as the hunter/gatherer who dance around the fire ignited by a lightning storm.

Why physicalist emergentism? Because it seems to be the most holistic concept that resonates between almost all fields in science and our conceptual understanding of reality. Almost every field in modern science seem to point towards physical nature producing complexities that form separate higher emergent properties. And in this framework it becomes clear that most of the counter arguments pointing out the gaps in scientific theories mostly just point towards the gap between low complexity and the emergent properties that forms out of higher complexity. Forming a counter argument that uses the mismatch between them as the entire foundation for calling it wrong. I strongly believe that this is the main reason we don't have a theory of everything yet, because we desperately try to match up two sides of the same coin without accepting them being two separate sides. We try to combine the low complex state with the high complex state believing we would find an explanation for the emergent properties. It's why this inability to find a theory of everything so closely resembles our inability to explain consciousness, because it operates on the same principles; we observe consciousness and try to explain it with neurons or specific parts of the brain and body, yet unable to connect between them to fully explain. But if consciousness is an emergent property that appears out of an almost infinite complexity that is the result of an extreme amount of simpler parts interacting with each other, then it is impossible to just draw a simple line between the two. And in order to explain it we require a better holistic framework and therefor combining the physicalist perspective with emergentism.

This is found in everything, in theories of consciousness, physics, biology, math etc. Chemistry is entirely built upon working with these emergent properties by disregarding much of the details in physics and operating on primarily the emergent properties of matter, forming new emergent properties. In math it explains the infinity of decimals in constants, which might not even be infinite, only that the geometrical precision ends at the Planck scale leaving us with such an undefined point of last decimals that not only is the number too long for us to calculate, but also ending up being a variable if able to. That since the number of decimals is so long, the complexity is so vast that we require a computer as complex as reality itself to compute it. And fundamentally makes math a blunt tool to calculate reality for us and therefor we have problems connecting low complexity with emergent properties.

So if these phenomena and observations are so common everywhere, so ingrained in everything around us, why, in the name of Occam, would we argue for any other explanations; primarily operating out of our arrogance as humans, our ego and will to be special? We have no evidence for ourselves being that special, so why would we begin with such an unproven starting point which so many other theories operate from?

Why not instead operate through a framework that rhymes with what we actually can observe almost everywhere around us? It is at least the most viable framework that exist at the moment and we should always use the sharpest tool we have, regardless of how much it might hurt our ego.

Extraordinarily well stated.

I see what you mean. But what I’m wanting to differentiate is the sensory from the intellectual. Numbers and the like can only be apprehended by a rational intelligence that is capable of counting. It is that faculty which I claim that physicalism cannot meaningfully account for. — Wayfarer

If I understand correctly, you are referring to something similar to Kant's categories. In this case to the quantity category. Well, I'm not a big fan of nativism. Although I consider that there is certainly a disposition of consciousness that allows access to mathematical knowledge without many problems. That is, consciousness is not primarily a tabula rasa but is already in a certain continuity with a differentiated world (here differentiation would be a genesis of the category of quantity). The mathematical knowledge that we learn as children shapes this disposition of the human intellect to the point that we can conceive a mathematical object in itself and in its ideality. I speak of an objective and historically rooted constructivism.

Now, the history, this history since I am born and molded to the point of being able to conceive mathematical objects in their ideality and objectivity cannot be described in terms of physics. It is like founding epistemology from quantum physics. That doesn't make any sense. In this sense the whole is more than what we believe its parts to be. Even the idea that we talk about a whole and its parts seems to falter. We may have to talk about different realities in relationship where no reality is more fundamental than the other. This would be a materialism, but a materialism of the Platonic Symploke without substance and without fundamentalism in order to respect the relative autonomy and irreducibility of the dimensions of reality evidenced by the sciences.

The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable.

I can’t say I’ve heard this statement. Maybe a quote is in order. But, given that all statements are produced by physical beings, are etched or spoken into physical mediums, and non-physical statements cannot be shown to exist, it does check out.

I don't think this got the attention it deserves:

The statement that "only physical statements are true" is not a statement in physical terms. It is neither falsifiable nor demonstrable.
— Banno — Banno

This is sort of what Wittgenstein is saying in the Tractatus, right? It doesn't get the attention it deserves because it spoils all the fun. :razz:

I would simply say that there are phenomena that are given — JuanZu

I think that's similar to saying gravity is an explanandum in its own right. We're just saying it's a given.

I don't mean given in the sense of something given once and for all without the need for explanation. I am referring to something given in a historically validated scientific field. When you learn mathematics you access demonstrations, laws, necessary relationships and so on that you can practice without having to think about a supposedly more fundamental reality (let's say physics). That it is unnecessary is proof of an autonomy of the sciences and of the discontinuity in knowledge as a whole.

It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level.
— wonderer1

Maybe.

I think a supervenience relationship of A upon B is a bit weaker than being able to talk about some A phenomenon/property in terms of some distinct set of B phenomenon/properties. All you need to say that A supervenes upon B is that there can be no A difference without a B difference - you don't need to know a correspondence between A and B, just provide an existential guarantee.

How you flesh out the "cannot" in "There cannot be an A difference without a B difference" is also very important. Since, say, if cannot means "physically impossible", it could still be logically possible that there can be an A difference without a B difference. So an established supervenience relationship in terms of physical possibility could still allow a failure of supervenience relationship in terms of logical possibility between the same A and B to fail. — fdrake

For me supervenience is an epistemic tool I typically use in what I'll call a visuo-intuitive sort of way, without seeing a need for a logically rigorous definition. It is more an essential perspective in the high accuracy measurment instrument design that I do, that involves cognitively zooming in and out between a closer to fundamental physics perspective and higher level design concept perspective.

It seems to me that skill at using such an epistemic tool develops mostly subconsciously in people who consider systems in an indepth manner, due to the limits of human cognitive faculties that simply aren't capable of considering the workings of a complex system in fundamental physics terms. I'd think that most who have developed such cognitive skills have never heard the word "supervenience" and wouldn't see much value in a rigorous definition of something they do intuitively.

Anyway, logical possibilities are for marketing. Engineers get stuck with disabusing the marketing people of their logically possible fantasies, and designing within the vastly more restrictive realm of the physically possible.

I don't mean given in the sense of something given once and for all without the need for explanation. — JuanZu

Sorry, that's what I meant. "Explanandum" was changed to "explanation" by my autotext. Fixed.

:up:

Yes, I think it makes sense that we cannot and maybe sometimes should not go for the most reductive explanations. I don't think of science as having a goal toward explaining things in increasingly reductive or decomposed ways.

But I do think, insofar as we have a spatial conception of the world, there is still this asymmetry of larger scales depending on the small in that kind of supervenience sense, which maybe is quite weak (too weak for decomposition? not sure, need to think about that) as opposed to a full blown reduction (Again, I think probably there are various ways of construing reductionism so its about strength of reduction). But then it has to be weak because then manner in which our models are incomplete and give different conceptual and empirical perspectives / reference frames, the taxonomy of our models and theories do not neatly match up at all to our ideal vision of a world full of objects with rigid boundaries organized at different levels. They may never match up to that ideal, even in principle, because we only can have insight into reality vicariously. We kind of blindly prod at reality and it prods us back, and obviously the prods we feel shouldn't be conflated with the cause of the prod. At the same time, maybe physics shouldn't be conflated with scale since physics works on all scales and some physics applies across multiple scales.

It'd be great to have a proper study. I went to physics review, and did a quick search of titles, finding 716,414 altogether.

Now let's set up a standard - "mass" is certainly a central term in physics. Wolfram has it as occurring once in every 12,987 general written words. My search found it in 9,257 titles, giving it a ratio of once in every 77 titles. It's clear "mass" is a key term in physics.

Now let's do "cause". Wolfram has it as once in every 7194 written words. It occurs 137 times in the journals searched. that's about once in every 5500 titles. No where near "mass"

So in standard written English text, "mass" occurs once in about 13,000 words, but in the titles of physics texts, it occurs about once in every 77 titles. "Cause" appears once in every 7000 words in standards written texts, and about once in every 5500 titles in physics Journal titles.

Of course these results are tentative. But...

Now, the history, this history since I am born and molded to the point of being able to conceive mathematical objects in their ideality and objectivity cannot be described in terms of physics. It is like founding epistemology from quantum physics. That doesn't make any sense. — JuanZu

I agree, but how or why you can then go on to maintain that this is ‘a materialism’, I don’t understand, but please don’t feel any obligation to provide further explanation.

I would posit myself as a physicalist emergentist. What type is still up in the air since that's a realm depending on yet unproven scientific theories. — Christoffer

That would be something like Popper’s ‘promissory materialism’, would it not? Popper coined this term to critique a particular stance within the philosophy of mind. This stance holds that physicalist explanations for all mental phenomena will eventually be found, even if current scientific understanding falls short. Popper saw this as a kind of "promissory note" – a belief in future explanations based on physicalism, despite a lack of current evidence or understanding. It is difficult to disentangle from scientism, the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion or marginalization of any other perspective. Like promissory materialism, scientism assumes that science will eventually provide answers to all questions, including those traditionally addressed by philosophy, the humanities, or religions.

The cardinal difficulty with both views is that it neglects or ignores a fundamental starting axiom of scientific method, which is limiting the scope of enquiry to the realm of objective fact, and in so doing, also disregarding the role of the scientist in choosing which questions to pose and how they should be posed. And that can’t be dealt with by the idea of emergence, because in that paradigm, the very faculty which poses the questions is supposed to be the outcome or effect of some prior and presumably physical causal chain, by some unknown means - which we’ll work out in future, promise!

So a key premise of Russell's argument, is simply not true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree, and don't even understand why it gained traction.

Of course these results are tentative. — Banno

But they're also meaningless. Just because the term 'cause' doesn't appear, doesn't mean that it's not a central premise in physics. That's why I said it is implicit in physics, which you seemed to regard as some kind of sophistry or wordplay. But it's not! When a billiard ball strikes another, it causes it to move in a certain direction with certain velocity, as per your proferred example, even if it avoids the use of that terminology. All of science is concerned with causation - viruses cause illnesses, vaccines cause them to be cured, lift causes airplanes to fly, its absences causes them to stall, and so on.

For me supervenience is an epistemic tool I typically use in what I'll call a visuo-intuitive sort of way, without seeing a need for a logically rigorous definition. It is more an essential perspective in the high accuracy measurment instrument design that I do, that involves cognitively zooming in and out between a closer to fundamental physics perspective and higher level design concept perspective. — wonderer1

I suppose that's a nonstandard use then.

What about 'energy' or 'force'? In physics it is energy or force which is understood to cause change, which would mean that wherever you have talk of energy or force, change and hence causation is implicit.

But then we do know, from the inside, what a brain is "like" by having experience, given that experience must arise from this organ. The issue is, what parts of it are we experiencing? That's very hard to know at this stage. — Manuel

Right, we may generally feel our thoughts to be centered in our heads, but we don't, without being told or seeing someone's head opened up, even know we have a brain. Our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and our most sensitive organs of touch are all clustered on our heads, so we have the intuitive sense that the head is central to our experience. We have absolutely no sensation that is intuitively identifiable as neural activity.

It is difficult to disentangle from scientism, the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion or marginalization of any other perspective. — Wayfarer

I'd suggest replacing "authoritative" with "reliable". Authority doesn't really have anything to do with it.

The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/

Authority doesn't really have anything to do with it. — wonderer1

Tosh. Science builds continually on previous findings which constitute a body of knowledge. Newton 'stands on the shoulders of giants'. That constitutes authority, albeit one that every individual scientist is expected to question as well as to accept. But here the discussion was about science:

science, which in turn is arguably the best way for humans to form conclusions about anything. — Christoffer

Notice the scope of that claim - not about those things which are objectively measurable and about which we may arrive at inter-subjective agreement, but anything. So here science is being presented not only as an authority, but as a moral authority.

Maybe (as I suspect) that's a claim that scientists themselves would not make, regardless it is true that science is looked to as the 'arbiter of reality'.

Newton 'stands on the shoulders of giants'. That constitutes authority... — Wayfarer

I think you misinterpret. I read that statement as an expression of humility, and recognizing the role of earlier thinkers in Newton being able to achieve what he did. I've never heard anyone suggest it is a claim to authority.

The fact science builds on earlier discoveries is not a flaw, it is one of the main causes of its spectacular success. But it's also indubitably a source of authority - not in the legalistic sense of enforcing laws, but in the sense of grounding the body of scientific knowledge. And in the context of this debate, about the reality of physicalism, the authority of science looms large. However, you're replying to my reply to someone else's post, so what you mean might be quite different to what I was responding to.