Bridge laws in the Philosophy of Mind and in the Physical Sciences

Abstract

(This article is part of a project by Trans/Form/Ação: Unesp Philosophy Journal. It is the Authorial Philosophy Dossier, to be published in 2022.) In the debate on the reducibility of mind over body, we argue that it is not plausible to assume that such a reduction can be made only over the basal physical conditions, but rather that one must also take into account the psychophysiological bridge laws.  This position is usually considered in the Philosophy of Mind to be antireductionist, but we prefer to call it “inductive reductionism”, due to the analogy with two other forms of determination in the Physical Sciences: causal determinism and spatial scalar reductionism.  The discussion is made with the use of abstract “epistemological probes”, such as Laplace’s demon, the scalar demon, and the psychophysiological demon. We also criticize the notion of synchronical causality used by Searle.