Mc Dowell Naturalism
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Mc Dowell distinguishes between “smooth” and “bald” naturalism. Both of these conceptions involve a type of naturalism that postulates some sort of supervenience of the mental upon the physical (for attempt to define a naturalism without this supervenience relation see Price Naturalism Without Representationalism). If one were to plot the varieties of naturalism for Mc Dowell on a line with bald at one end and smooth at the other what enables one to move down the line from the bald to the smooth is the degree to which our spontaneity is included in the supervenience relation posited (i.e. the more fundamentally involved the smoother the naturalism).
For Mc Dowell it is mistake to think that the way in which we relate mind to world can only be defined as a point along this axis, i.e. that we must postulate a way in which spontaneity supervenes upon the physical. He argues that it is the commonly held views that nature is just the realm of law and that spontaneity is sui generis that, taken together, lead us to this mistaken assumption.
In class (and in the associated handout) Bruin argued that it is fact only the view that nature is just the realm of law that leads us to this way of thinking of the way in which we must relate spontaneity to world (a picture which has been with us in one form or another since Descartes).
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Questions - {[green Is the straight line mentioned above really a good model for the comparison of smooth and bald naturalism? How many ways are there that one can involve spontaneity in an account of supervenience? What exactly does it mean to say that one potential account of supervenience involves spontaneity more than another? This seems to presuppose that there is some way of making this judgement. Chris ]}
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