An ontological theory.
Kind of a narrow descendant of materialism.
Thesis: Everything is physical, or at least depends on the physical.
“The physical” as defined by physics.
Which traps it in “Hempel’s dilemma”:
a) Current physics is likely incomplete, so physicalism-by-current-physics is likely false.
b) Completed physics: nobody knows what it’ll say, so the thesis becomes “whatever turns out to exist is physical”, which is trivially true / unfalsifiable.
Materialism sidesteps a) bcs it’s not committed to what current physics posits.
You’ve stated Hempel’s dilemma cleanly. Woods’ response would be that it only bites physicalism,
and dissolves on dialectical materialism because that tradition already separates the
philosophical concept of matter from the scientific conception of it. This is exactly the move
Lenin made in 1908 in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written in response to the then-current
“crisis of physics” — radioactivity, the electron, Mach’s positivism — when idealists proclaimed
“matter has disappeared”.
Lenin’s reply, which Woods would echo point for point:
The “matter disappears” means that the limit within which we hitherto knew matter is
▎ disappearing and that our knowledge is penetrating deeper; properties of matter are likewise
▎ disappearing which formerly seemed absolute, immutable, and primary… and which are now revealed to be relative and characteristic only of certain states of matter.
The sole “property” of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind.
- Horn 2 (completed physics): Woods would accept that “completed physics” is a mirage — science is
an endless, dialectical process, not something that terminates. But this doesn’t make materialism
unfalsifiable-because-trivial. Materialism makes a substantive claim: that whatever physics
converges toward is an approximation to a mind-independent reality, not a construction of
consciousness, not God’s thoughts, not discourse, not a correlate of the transcendental subject.
Idealism denies this. The claim is substantive because its negation is coherently statable and
historically held.
He’d probably add a polemical note: the dilemma assumes metaphysics has to be built downstream of
physics — that “physical” is where the action is and philosophy must catch up. Dialectical
materialism reverses this: the philosophical categories (matter, motion, contradiction, causation)
frame what physics can even investigate. So “what does physical mean?” is the wrong question. The
right one is: does objective reality exist independently of consciousness, and is it knowable?
Materialism answers yes/yes. That thesis doesn’t depend on any particular physical theory being
right or complete.
One honest concession a thoughtful Woodsian should make: this response sidesteps Hempel’s dilemma
only by refusing its terms. If you’re asking a physicalist what “physical” means, you’re stuck. If
you’re asking a dialectical materialist what “matter” means, the answer is prior to and
independent of physics. The price is that “materialism” so defined is broader and fuzzier than
physicalism — it makes a metaphysical claim about mind-independence rather than a scientific claim
about fundamental ontology. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on what you want the word
to do.
Reductive physicalism: Higher-level kinds are just microphysical kinds (i.e. everything is just physics).
Nonreductive physicalism: There’s multiple realizability (i.e. higher-level kinds can be implemented by different lower-level kinds), and distinct levels of explanation are needed.