# Contested concept: physicalism

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: semantic
- **Diagnosis**: Whether the hard problem refutes physicalism depends on whether physicalism requires a priori entailment and reductive explanation or only metaphysical identity.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/physicalism` (data: `/concept/physicalism.json`)

## Senses in use
- **A posteriori physicalism: identity holds despite a persistent explanatory gap** — used in 3 claim(s)
- **Empirically vindicated, not decidable a priori, open to collapsing into other views** — used in 3 claim(s)
- **Everything, including consciousness, is reductively explainable by microphysical constituents** — used in 3 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [If physicalism is true, the hard problem cannot be a real problem.](/claim/claim_2d95c005274e.md) _(sense: Everything, including consciousness, is reductively explainable by microphysical constituents)_
- [According to physicalism, everything, including consciousness, can be explained by appeal to its microphysical constituents.](/claim/claim_36fd7890ebb2.md) _(sense: Everything, including consciousness, is reductively explainable by microphysical constituents)_
- [[On Richard Brown's type-C materialism,] the two major positions (physicalism and dualism) can only be vindicated empirically, i.e. through…](/claim/claim_3e6783f4b03a.md) _(sense: Empirically vindicated, not decidable a priori, open to collapsing into other views)_
- [Physicalism, sometimes labelled materialism, is the view that everything that exists is a physical or material thing, so everything can be …](/claim/claim_5e54d02af3da.md) _(sense: Everything, including consciousness, is reductively explainable by microphysical constituents)_
- [Type-B Materialists are committed to physicalism.](/claim/claim_8808cfea18a6.md) _(sense: A posteriori physicalism: identity holds despite a persistent explanatory gap)_
- [Type-B materialism, also known as weak reductionism or a posteriori physicalism, is the view that the hard problem [of consciousness] stems…](/claim/claim_9a737f14571e.md) _(sense: A posteriori physicalism: identity holds despite a persistent explanatory gap)_
- [Richard Brown has defended an unorthodox form of type-C materialism which states that the hard problem [of consciousness] cannot be decided…](/claim/claim_de4e0f39c686.md) _(sense: Empirically vindicated, not decidable a priori, open to collapsing into other views)_
- [Consciousness and neurobiology are one and the same in reality.](/claim/claim_e4452dc2ad79.md) _(sense: A posteriori physicalism: identity holds despite a persistent explanatory gap)_
- [Type-C materialism is compatible with several cases and could collapse into one of these other metaphysical views [Type-A, Type-B, Type-D o…](/claim/claim_fddba707eeac.md) _(sense: Empirically vindicated, not decidable a priori, open to collapsing into other views)_