BEYOND MATERIALISM: MENTAL CAPACITY AND NATURALISM,A CONSIDERATION OF METHOD

Abstract: This article challenges the neo‐Darwinist physicalist position assumed by currently prevalent naturalizing accounts of consciousness. It suggests instead an evolutionary (Deweyan) understanding of cognitive emergence and an acceptance of mental capacity as a phenomenon in its own right, differing qualitatively from, although not independent of, the physical and material world. I argue that if we accept that consciousness is an adaptation enabling survival through immediate individual intuition of the world, we may accept this metaphysics as a given. Methodological focus can then shift to investigating the, as yet untheorized, nature of consciousness itself as capacity/interconnectivity/potential. The article accepts Joseph Margolis's recent advocacy of a pragmatist approach that is “natural but not naturalizable” ( Margolis 2002 , 7), that is, an anti‐reductionist as opposed to an eliminativist position, but it seeks to develop this position further and to give it new direction.