Beyond the Reduction-Non-Reduction Dilemma

The contemporary debate between reductionist physicalism and non-reductionist physicalism tends to treat the question of mind — consciousness, intentionality, rationality, meaning — as a problem of reduction. Should the mental be identified with the cerebral, merely be made to supervene upon it, or be granted a higher-level autonomy compatible with the physical unity of the world? This article argues that this way of framing the problem rests on a deeper misunderstanding. The disagreement between reduction and non-reduction does not primarily concern the proper articulation of the mental and the physical; rather, both sides already presuppose that the decisive issue is to determine what can be brought back to matter and by what means. Yet this problematic misses its object. What resists the thesis that “everything is matter” is not necessarily an additional entity, nor a supernatural domain, but the very register in which object, truth, error, reference, validity, and justification appear. Meaning is not an additional fact that would have to be located somewhere in the physical world; it is the regime according to which certain occurrences can count as judgments, reasons, errors, references to objects, and more generally as grips on truth and falsity. In this respect, a large part of the field of critical philosophy — that which investigates the conditions of possibility of objectivity and meaning — escapes the simple internal redistribution of physicalist options. This yields a structural instability. Reduction tends to dissolve the normativity it claims to explain by replacing the distinctions between true and false, valid and invalid, justified and unjustified, with mere causal or functional distinctions. Non-reduction, for its part, preserves the vocabulary of normativity, but at the price of a persistent tension with the causal closure of the physical, a tension crystallized in the classical problem of exclusion. An examination of the main contemporary attempts to naturalize meaning—informational semantics, teleosemantics, causal theories of reference, computational functionalism—shows that none derives normativity from causality alone: all reintroduce it, displace it, or implicitly presuppose it. The article therefore proposes a different line of division. The task is to distinguish, without substantively separating them, a causal regime, to which physical, biological, and computational descriptions belong, and a normative regime, to which meaning, objectivity, validity, correctness, and error belong. Such a position seeks neither to challenge science nor to restore a dualism of substances. It seeks rather to prevent a legitimate methodological naturalism from turning, in the absence of an explicit theory of meaning, into an insufficiently grounded ontological monism. For more detailed developments, see Philosophy of Meaning, Geoffroy de Clisson (open access on PhilPapers). Keywords: physicalism; materialism; reduction; supervenience; normativity; meaning; intentionality; causal exclusion; naturalized semantics; space of reasons.