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HORGAN's NATURALISTIC METAPHYSICS of MIND Jaegwon Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (2002) 27-52 HORGAN’S NATURALISTIC METAPHYSICS OF MIND Jaegwon KIM Brown University Summary Terry Horgan has made impressive and highly important contributions to numerous fields of philosophy – metaphysics, philosophy of mind and psychology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and value theory, to mention the most prominent ones. What gives Horgan’s work a powerful and clarifying unity is his deep and unflagging commitment to philosophical naturalism. In fact, Horgan himself has often invoked natu- ralism to motivate his positions and arguments on a number of philosophi- cal issues. In this talk, I will discuss some questions concerning Horgan’s naturalism and his philosophy of mind. Among them are such questions as these: What exactly is the naturalism that drives Horgan’s philosophical thinking? Is it a reasonable and plausible form of naturalism? Exactly how does his naturalism lead to the conclusions and arguments he defends? Should “proper” naturalists follow Horgan’s lead? I will discuss these questions in relation to Horgan’s work on mind-body supervenience, the autonomy of psychological explanation, reductionism, mental causation, and related issues. Over the past two and half decades Terry Horgan has produced an impressive body of philosophical work on a wide-ranging group of problems spanning numerous philosophical fields. Let me just men- tion some of the topics he has dealt with: the ontology of events and actions, the mind-body problem, physicalism, supervenience and reduction, Newcomb’s problem, the status of folk psychology, agency and compatibilism, qualia and mental causation, connec- tionism and mental representation, the problem of vagueness, meta- ethical issues such as moral realism and moral truth, intentionality 28 and the status of semantic properties – the list can go on and on. But there has been one prominent theme that runs through Horgan’s work, giving it both unity and coherence and making it more than a mere assemblage of fine papers, and that is his allegiance to philo- sophical naturalism. More than once he has explicitly proclaimed his naturalistic commitments, and several of his important papers in the past decade or so have been devoted to the program of “naturaliz- ing” one or another of our discourses – or, for discourses that resist naturalization but which we wish to retain, the program of “accom- modating” them within a naturalistic framework. Not only has Horgan dealt with naturalization/accommodation projects in spe- cific areas – for example, with regard to moral/normative and se- mantic/intentional languages – but he has also developed a general theoretical scheme for executing such projects and a philosophical rationale for it. I In this paper, I want to examine Horgan’s naturalism and his idea of naturalization in some detail, with particular attention to his stance on the metaphysical status of the mind. Rather than scouring Horgan’s entire philosophical corpus, I will focus on several of what I regard as his more important papers touching on issues of natural- ism and mind. Specifically, I will largely restrict my attention to the following works: “Supervenience and Cosmic Hermeneutics” (1984), “Troubles on Moral Twin-Earth: Moral Queerness Revived” (1992, with Timmons), “Metaphysical Naturalism, Semantic Normativity, and Meta-Semantic Irrealism” (1993, with Tim- mons), “From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World” (1993a), “Nonreductive Materialism and the Explanatory Autonomy of Psychology” (1993b), and “Natu- ralism and Intentionality” (1994). As we will see, Horgan appears to have changed his mind on a number of issues, but it would be point- less, and contrary to the idea of philosophical progress, to insist on complete consistency on all issues, large and small, over a period spanning 20 years, and, in any case, on some important themes, he has remained remarkably single-minded and steadfast. Even so, we.
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