Materialism: A Historical and Philosophical Inquiry

by Robin Gordon Brown, James Ladyman

The doctrine of materialism is one of the most controversial in the history of ideas. For much of its history it has been aligned with toleration and enlightened thinking, but it has also aroused strong, often violent, passions amongst both its opponents and proponents. This book explores the development of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way and defends the form it takes in the twenty-first century.Opening with an account of the ideas of some of the most important thinkers in the materialist tradition, including Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Hume, Darwin and Marx, the authors discuss materialism's origins, as an early form of naturalistic explanation and as an intellectual outlook about life and the world in general. They explain how materialism's beginnings as an imaginative vision of the true nature of things faced a major challenge from the physics it did so much to facilitate, which now portrays the microscopic world in a way incompatible with traditional materialism. Brown and Ladyman explain how out of this challenge materialism developed into the new doctrine of physicalism.Drawing on a wide range of colourful examples, the authors argue that although materialism does not have all the answers, its humanism and commitment to naturalistic explanation and the scientific method is our best philosophical hope in the ideological maelstrom of the modern world.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, History, Humanities, Physics, Metaphysics

142 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 29, 2019

Reviews

[Chant · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I were teaching a course on analytic philosophy, I would surely use this text for my students.
Brown and Ladyman, give a (brief) historical explanation of philosophical materialism through the ages, with some nods to Indic materialism. The last few chapters, I think, are of great use for people interested in the current state of analytic philosophy of mind and science, as they explained (clearly) what 'supervenience' and why the term 'materialism' fell out of favour and the term 'physicalism' took it's place.

It was a quick read and a text I would suggest for non-academics.

[Myat Thura Aung · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't believe a specious argument about conditional probabilities went unnoticed by both the authors and the beta readers. On pp 66-67, Brown and Ladyman write:

"The core of the argument is this: a miracle is a violation of a law of nature. A law of nature has been established on the basis of compelling evidence. It is probable that the violation did not occur and we are obliged to look critically at the evidence for the violation. In an Introduction to Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Millican gives a striking illustration to make Hume’s case. He asks us to imagine he is worried about a very rare disease that affects only one person in a million, and that there is a test for the disease that produces positive results with 99.9-percent accuracy. That is, out of every 1000 people who test positive for the disease, 999 actually have it and one does not. He then imagines taking the test and getting a positive result. Ought you to conclude from this evidence that he probably has the disease? No, notwithstanding the positive result it is still very much more likely that he is the one in 1000 whose test result is wrong, than the one in a million who actually has the disease." [Emphasis mine.]

Now, anyone with a basic understanding of probability theory should see through this fallacious reasoning. Brown and Ladyman are comparing apples with oranges. Someone with a positive result but with no disease is only one in a thousand. Okay, but one in a thousand what? One in a thousand people with positive feedbacks. In the general populace, are they one in a thousand? Not at all. In fact, they are strictly rarer than people with disease. Here's a mathematical demonstration.

According to Brown and Ladyman,
P(Disease) = 0.000001
P(No Disease) = 0.999999
P(Disease | Test +) = 0.999
P(No Disease | Test +) = 0.001

Using Baye's Theorem,
P(Test +) P(Disease | Test +) = P(Disease) P(Test + | Disease)
0.999 P(Test +) = 0.000001  P(Test + | Disease)

Likewise, P(Test +) P(No Disease | Test +) = P(No Disease) P(Test + | No Disease)
0.001 P(Test +) = 0.999999 P(Test + | No Deases)

Eliminating P(Test +),
P(Test + | No Deases)/ P(Test + | Disease) = 1/111111 < 10^(-6)
P(Test + | No Disease) < P(Test + | Disease) × 10^(-6) < 10^(-6)
This shows that if you don't have disease, there is at most only one in a million chance to get a positive result.

Moreover, P(Test + and No Disease) = P(No Disease) × P(Test + | No Disease) < 10^(-6) × 0.999999 < P(Disease)
This justifies the claim that people with a positive result but with no disease are strictly rarer than people with the rare disease. It is more likely that you have disease if you test positive in this scenario.

Now, Brown and Ladyman cites Millican. Does Millican commit the same fallacy or is he being misrepresented here? It turns out that Millican's argument is being misrepresented by Brown and Ladyman. Millican's argument in his own words is this:

"Suppose, for example, that I am worried about a genetic disease that afflicts one in a million people, and take a test for it which has a 99.9% chance of giving the ‘correct’ result (i.e. if I have the disease, it is 99.9% likely to come out positive, and if I don’t, it is only 0.1% likely to come out positive). Most people would naturally take a positive result as showing that I very probably have the disease. However the one in a million ‘background probability’ outweighs the one in a thousand chance of the test’s getting it wrong, leaving an overall probability that I have the disease, based on this evidence, of only 1 in 1,002. Thus a false test is far more likely than the disease itself."

Mathematically, according to Millican,
P(Disease) = 0.000001
P(No Disease) = 0.999999
P(Test + | Disease) = 0.999
P(Test + | No Disease) = 0.001

Notice that this is not equivalent to saying "Out of every 1000 people who test positive for the disease, 999 actually have it and one does not." Millican says, "If I have no disease, it is 0.1% likely to come out positive" while Brown and Ladyman say, "If I come out positive, it is 0.1% likely that I have no disease." What we see is basically a conflation of conditional probabilities. Brown and Ladyman conflates P(Test + | Disease) with P(Disease | Test +); P(Test + | No Disease) with P(No Disease | Test +).


Otherwise, I would have given this book 3 stars but for this conflation–most likely an oversight–I take out a star.

[Frank Jude · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brown and Ladyman have presented a clearly exposited history and inquiry into Materialism and its place in history and where it has led to in contemporary times with the newer sciences of relativity and quantum mechanics. Those who would most benefit are those who think they know what materialism is and thus are critical and dismissive of it but who most likely lack any real understanding of it and how so much of Liberal humanism and the values of the Enlightenment are the consequences of it.

Materialism has, through most of history, been a marginalized view, often persecuted by its opponents -- often with the punishment of death! Those opponents mostly intolerant religion. In fact, toleration of diverse views is one of the most valuable outcomes of materialism!

That said, the writers do not shy away from the fact that the only times materialism became the dominant ideology in the 20th century, it led to the horrors of Stalinism! But that is clearly, as they point out, not an inherent aspect of Materialism.

The latter part of the book details why they argue for a version of materialism called "physicalism" which takes into account the realities uncovered by modern science, specifically, physics! They point out an aspect of physicalism that places it in a rather different relationship to science than most philosophy: "Modern physicalist materialism prides itself on its refutability. It may be false, and it may be proved to be demonstrably false by future advances in human knowledge." Such a stance requires a humility those with religious views of certainty, as well as ideologues of various stripes lack.

There is one criticism I feel incumbent upon me to mention and that is a piece of misinformation regarding Buddhism found on page 16. They write, in the context of materialism's atheism: "An obvious example of a non-materialist atheism would be the Buddhist tradition, which holds that there is no god but which does believe in the transmigration of souls." This is wrong because the Buddha explicitly denied the existence of souls and of transmigration! Transmigration is an accurate description of the reincarnation taught in Hinduism, as where Krishna instructs Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita describing how just as a man takes off one suit of clothes and puts on another, a soul leaves one body and migrates into another at death. The Buddha denied that kind of reincarnation, instead offering a concept of "rebirth" which is not the migration of a soul but the continuance of a stream or impulse of action and volition. What is reborn is not the same individual, but also not completely different or distinct in the same way that a person at 50 years of age is not the same as the person they were at 5 years old nor completely unrelated. Of course, a materialist and naturalist such as I deny that kind of continuance as well. Unless there is irrefutable evidence that consciousness of any kind can exist outside of a living brain, there is no mechanism to explain such 'rebirth' and so Zen Naturalism denies its reality.

[Steve Ramsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice and clear prose. However, it’s a very short book for the price, and has a thin bibliography for an academic book. Some sections seem to rely quite heavily on quotes from one source, eg Anthony Kenny on Epicurus, Carlo Rovelli on modern physics.