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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2000 51(2):273-286; doi:10.1093/bjps/51.2.273
© 2000 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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Locating the overdetermination problem

DG Witmer

Department of Philosophy, 330 Griffin-Floyd Hall, PO Box 118545, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32511-8545, USA E-mail: gwitmer@phil.ufl.edu

Physicalists motivate their position by posing a problem for the opposition: given the causal completeness of physics and the impact of the mental (or, more broadly, the seemingly nonphysical) on the physical, antiphysicalism implies that causal overdetermination is rampant. This argument is, however, equivocal in its use of 'physical'. As Scott Sturgeon has recently argued, if 'physical' means that which is the object of physical theory, completeness is plausible, but the further claim that the mental has a causal impact on the physical is no longer so evident. In this paper I assess the damage due to the ambiguity of 'physical' and provide a repair to the overdetermination strategy.


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