The Criticism of the Anti-Physicalism Program in the Modern Philosophy of Mind

The problem of the philosophical foundations of the theory of mind in the context of the relation of philosophical and scientific knowledge is considered. The question on the practical meaning of metaphysics is discussed in a brief review of the development of positivist views. The specifics of Auguste Comte's orthodox doctrine in the first positivism, the verificationist epistemology in logical positivism and Karl Popper's falsificationism in postpositivism are demonstrated. An analysis of the positivist project shows that it does not propose a clear solution to the problem of demarcation of scientific and non-scientific knowledge. The main difficulty in this regard is the reflective nature of positivist propositions the influence of which does not extend to their own content. However, posi-tivists were able to demonstrate several important things. The first positivism taught that scientific and metaphysical knowledge belongs to different levels of abstraction and, therefore, should be used to solve different problems. At the stage of logical positivism, it became clear that only such questions are suitable for scientific discourse that can be answered unequivocally. Postpositivism in the person of Karl Popper established the principle that scientific knowledge which claims to be objective cannot at the same time claim to be universal. On the basis of the arguments presented, a general rule of demarcation of scientific and speculative knowledge is formulated. This rule applies to the anti-physicalist doctrine in the philosophy of mind, which allows identifying the speculative context in modern discussions about the ontological status of conscious experience. An illustration of this is Thomas Nagel's anti-physicalist position and David Chalmers's critical argument against physicalism. Daniel Dennett's opinion that speculative concepts obstruct the science of mind is reinforced by the obtained results. The conclusion is made about the non-scientificity of the anti-physicalist approach to the question of a unified theory of mind.

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