Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

- David Papineau

In truth a clear-headed physicalist shouldn't be thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-fibres firing, then there…

- David Papineau

I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuiti…

- David Papineau

A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physica…

- David Papineau

After all, in supporting phenomenal concepts I am in a sense siding with introspection against the more behaviourist Wittgensteinians. But even so I …

- David Papineau

The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available t…

- David Papineau

On the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspe…

- David Papineau

I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don'…

- David Papineau

I'm not so sure that I am a reductionist in the strict type-identity sense. The issues here are messy. But I certainly a reductionist in the more gen…

- David Papineau