The False Debate of Physicalism: Why the Opposition between Reductionism and Non-Reductionism Misses Its Object

The contemporary opposition between reductive physicalism and non-reductive physicalism is often treated as one of the major fault lines in the philosophy of mind. This article argues that the opposition rests on a fundamental misunderstanding in the very way the problem is posed. The disagreement does not primarily concern how the mental and the physical are to be articulated; it is inscribed within a shared framework in which the decisive question is taken to be what can be brought back to matter, and by what routes. It is precisely this presupposition that must be called into question. So long as the problem of meaning— of signifying forms, of the normativity of truth and falsity, and of the status of rules— is not addressed, the physicalist debate remains captive to a monism that is methodologically effective yet philosophically insufficient. The thesis defended here is twofold. First, the passage from methodological materialism to ontological materialism involves an illegitimate slide: what functions as a principle of unification in the natural sciences does not by itself warrant the claim that everything that exists is thoroughly material. Second, signifying forms cannot be identified with their physical vehicles without erasing the very distinctions that make a true discourse about matter possible. The dispute between reduction and emergence thus appears as an internal quarrel within materialism, rather than as an adequate formulation of the problem. For more detailed developments, see Philosophy of Meaning, Geoffroy de Clisson (open access on PhilPapers). Keywords: physicalism; materialism; neo-Darwinism; principle of sufficient reason; cybernetics; Libet; meaning; normativity; emergence; intentionality.