Blackwell Reference Online

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Naturalism denies that there are any spiritual or supernatural realities. There are, that is, no purely mental substances and there are no supernatural realities transcendent to the world; or at least we have no sound grounds for believing that there are such realities or perhaps even for believing that there could be such realities. It is the view that anything that exists is ultimately made up of physical components.Naturalism sometimes has been reductionistic (claiming that all talk of the mental can be translated into purely physicalist terms) or scientistic (claiming that what science cannot tell us humankind cannot know). The more plausible forms of naturalism are neither across-the-board reductionistic nor scientistic (Nielsen 1996, ch. 1). Most claims that people make are not scientific; yet they can, for all that, be true or false. Many of them are quite plainly and uncontroversially in place. That it snows in Ontario in winter, that people very frequently fear death, that keeping promises is generally speaking a desirable thing are some unproblematic examples. And very frequently mentalistic talk in terms of intentions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and the like is not only useful, but indispensable if we are to make sense of human life and of the interactions between people. Such remarks are typically true or false and again sometimes unproblematically so. But such talk ... log in or subscribe to read full text