Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

Neutral Monism. A Miraculous, Incoherent, and Mislabeled
Doctrine?
Leopold Stubenberg, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
Neutral monism (NM) is a general metaphysical doctrine
about the nature of ultimate reality. It says that ultimate
reality is, in an important sense, one—that is the monism
of NM; and it says that this monistic reality is neither
mental nor physical—that is the neutrality of NM. For the
most part, the advocates of NM have been preoccupied
with the mind-body problem. If mind and matter are
composed of the same neutral reality, the gulf that
separates them must be more apparent than real.
In the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries NM enjoyed
a brief period of popularity, having been adopted by such
philosophers as Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand
Russell. But the doctrine soon dropped out of view,
possibly because some of the criticisms directed against it
seemed justified and serious. Prominent among those
criticisms was (and is) the claim that NM is nothing but a
thinly veiled versions of idealism or panpsychism. In an
interesting reversal of things, Galen Strawson—one of the
leading figures in the current revival of panpsychism—has
subjected NM to a trenchant critique. According to
Strawson, NM is either miraculous or incoherent.
After presenting Strawson’s arguments against NM,
I argue that Russell’s version of the doctrine is immune to
Strawson’s powerful objections. But Russell’s way out will,
in turn, make it all too obvious why it has seemed to many
philosophers that NM is nothing but idealism or
panpsychism. I shall end the paper by explaining why the
Russellian neutral monist rejects the charge that NM is a
version of mentalism. The upshot of all this is twofold.
First, NM (of the Russellian variety) is not open to the
challenge that Strawson tried to raise against all versions
of the doctrine. Second, this kind of NM must be
distinguished from mentalistic doctrines like idealism and
panpsychism.
The most interesting (and most controversial)
premise upon which Strawson’s case for panpsychism
rests is this:
Emergence can’t be brute. It is built into the heart of
the notion of emergence that emergence cannot be
brute in the sense of there being absolutely no reason
in the nature of things why the emerging thing is
as it is (so that it is unintelligible even to God). For
any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered
to be emergent from X, there must be something
about X and X alone in virtue of which Y
emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.
(Strawson 2006, 18)
The emergence of the liquidity of water is unproblematical;
but the emergence of experience from nonexperiential
matter is not. If it were to happen, it would be a miracle.
Only the adoption of panpsychism makes this miracle go
away. And Strawson argues that the same consideration
cuts against all forms of neutral monism. If basic reality is
neutral, i.e. nonexperiential, then the experiential cannot
emerge out of it, on pain of a miracle. Hence neutral monism
is not an option.
Strawson’s second objection to NM is this:
[NM] is incoherent, because experience—
appearance, if you like—cannot itself be only appearance,
i.e. not really real, because there must be
experience for there to be appearance …
(Strawson 2006, 23)
If only the neutral (i.e. the nonexperiential) is real, then the
experiential cannot be fundamentally real, i.e. it must be a
mere appearance. But that is absurd: there cannot be appearance
without experience. x’s appearing F simply consists
in someone’s experiencing x as F. One cannot get rid
of experience be declaring it to be a mere appearance.
Because appearance can only exist where there is experience.
These objections are powerful. But a closer
inspection of Russell’s NM seems to show that it is
immune to these challenges. Guided by the supreme
maxim of scientific philosophizing—“wherever possible,
substitute constructions out of known entities for
inferences to unknown entities.” (Russell 1924, 326)—
Russell adopted NM in 1919, because of the “immense
simplification” (Russell 1959, 103-4) it affords. The
unknown entities in need of logical construction are, on the
one hand, physical objects, and, on the other, the self. The
known entities that serve as construction material are
events. And some of these events, the data, are
immediately given.
Everything in the world is composed of events … An
‘event’ … is something having a small finite duration
and a small finite extension in space … When I
speak of an ‘event’ I do not mean anything out of
the way. Seeing a flash of lighting is an event, so is
hearing a tire burst, or smelling a rotten egg, or feeling
the coldness of a frog. These are events that are
“data” … we infer that there are events which are
not data and happen at a distance from our own
body. Some of these are data to other people, other
are data to no one … Particular colours and sounds
and so on are events; their causal antecedents in
the inanimate world are also events.
(Russell 1927b, 222)
The resulting view does have an idealist ring to it. Speaking
of the brain, for example, Russell has this to say:
While its [the brain’s] owner was alive, part, at least,
of the contents of his brain consisted of his percepts,
thoughts, and feelings. Since his brain also
consisted of electrons, we are compelled to conclude
that an electron is a grouping of events, and
that, if the electron is in a human brain, some of the
events composing it are likely to be some of the
“mental states” of the man to whom the brain belongs.
(Russell 1927a, 320)
“The brain consists of thoughts” (Russell 1959, 18) is Russell’s
most succinct expression of this thought. As for the
rest of the physical world, Russell is agnostic. But he does
tell us that
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