INTRODUCTION

In recent years, doctrines of retentive physicalism that eschew comprehensive claims of nonphysical-to-physical type identity have faced the charge that they epiphenomenalize both mental phenomena in particular and special- and honorary-scientific phenomena in general. Roughly, the objection is that if, for every special- and honorary-scientific phenomenon, there is a physical phenomenon sufficient for it (as physicalism requires), and if all such underlying physical phenomena are completely caused by earlier physical phenomena in strict accordance with physical laws, then special- and honorary-scientific phenomena are just riding piggyback on the physical phenomena; it is the physical phenomena that are doing all the real causal work, and the appearance of causation among special- or honorary-scientific phenomena is just an illusion. So, because special- and honorary-scientific causation is surely not an illusion, any doctrine of retentive physicalism that implies that it is thereby faces the apparently damning objection that it has to deny an obvious truth.

In fact, it is not clear just how damning such an objection would really be. Imagine a doctrine of retentive physicalism that is committed to repudiating special- and honorary-scientific causation as illusory, but which can nevertheless explain why we would still believe in such causation, even if it did not exist; suppose, for example, that this doctrine of physicalism can predict the holding, given the actual physical facts, of just those special- and honorary-scientific regularities that we do in fact observe, and suppose also that we have a strong psychological propensity to infer from such regularities the existence of special- and honorary-scientific causal relations.