However, when mathematics is treated as a functional tool, rather than as a foundation for theories, then one can still rely on
physicalistic justifications for mathematical formulations.
The idea is rather that the context is fixed in an objectivistic or
physicalistic way.
A
physicalistic concept of the biosphere sustainability.
Here the authors adopt a straightforward
physicalistic stance, as seen in the following passages:
Once the thesis of Physicalism was applied to the question at hand, implying that protocols must be expressed physicalistically, or translatable into
physicalistic language, it followed that protocols were just as fallible as any other statement.
Therefore, the supervention of deontology on consequentialism, to employ a
physicalistic metaphor, does not bankrupt the theoretic importance of deontology.
One way in which Patterson partially bridges the gap between postmodernism and modernism is by staking out a position somewhere between postmodern radical skeptics and modern foundationalists, whose views are inspired by a
physicalistic, scientific view of truth, language, and knowledge.(2) Patterson deploys a moderate postmodernism -- Brian Leiter elegantly describes it as a "sanitized" postmodernism(3) -- inspired by the philosophical work of Ludwig Wittgenstein,(4) Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Michael Dummett, and the constitutional jurisprudence of Philip Bobbitt.
By introducing a new set of disease-causative agents--namely, the patient's life history (especially "traumas" suffered during childhood)--Freud spoiled this purely
physicalistic conception of etiology and pathology.(10) At the same time, he reinforced the established social prestige of psychiatry with the seemingly scientific prestige of psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, when he talks of the projection of magical qualities on to the world, he seems to be presupposing a more objective,
physicalistic conception of world.
9 For instance, "technical realists" (as Richard Rorty calls philosophers like Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan) assume that the world is already divided into natural kinds and their particulars and that these are causally linked in a
physicalistic sense to terms of a given language (Rorty, Consequences xxiii).
As for the phrase "teleological psi," I fail to see how this could not be rendered in a
Physicalistic way.
For several generations, for instance, Ernst Mayr has warned against importing reductive and
physicalistic assumptions into biology.