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Token-Distinctness and the Disjunctive Strategy

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According to the Multiple Realizability Argument, a higher-level property typically has many physical realizers, so it cannot be type-identical to any one of them. This enables the non-reductive physicalist to… Click to show full abstract

According to the Multiple Realizability Argument, a higher-level property typically has many physical realizers, so it cannot be type-identical to any one of them. This enables the non-reductive physicalist to claim that some higher-level properties are type-distinct from physical properties. The reductive physicalist can counter with the Disjunctive Strategy: nothing prevents us from type-identifying the higher-level property with the disjunction of its realizers. Developing a powers-based ontology of properties, Shoemaker ( 2001 ) and Wilson ( 2011 ) present responses to the Disjunctive Strategy, wherein higher-level property instances are token-distinct from their realizers, while instances of disjunctions are not. In this paper, I argue that such responses to the Disjunctive Strategy can be reasonably resisted, either by denying token-distinctness, or by insisting that exhaustively overlapping disjunctive properties are also token-distinct from the realizers. This secures the Disjunctive Strategy as a core component of the argument for reductive physicalism.

Keywords: disjunctive strategy; token distinctness; strategy; higher level

Journal Title: Erkenntnis
Year Published: 2019

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