Do Biopsychosocial Causal Models Rule Out Physicalism?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Donald Price and James Barrell, two eminent pain researchers, argue that every time an experiment demonstrates that a biological variable is causally relevant to a psychological outcome, we are entitled to further rule out a possible mind–brain identity or supervenience relationship. As experimental evidence for two-way causal links between biological and psychological variables accumulates, more and more identity and supervenience relationships are ruled out, suggesting that psychophysicalism is empirically better supported than physicalism. I raise an objection to this line of argumentation by pointing out that, in the studies in question, causation is established within an operationalized framework; that is, irrespective of whether one knows what exactly is being manipulated and measured and how the intervention and measurement techniques work. By itself, evidence for causal relevance doesn't demonstrate that to each manipulated variable corresponds an ontologically distinct cause. This opens the possibility that some variables share common referents, as postulated by physicalist accounts. Moreover, even if it is not clear how to test for identity or supervenience relationships, it is still possible to test for causal mediation, which can generate empirical evidence discriminating between reductive physicalism and non-reductive alternatives.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it