Metaphysics of Mind & Knowledge

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Abstractions about philosophical positions on mind, reality and knowledge — theories of the mind-body relation (epiphenomenalism, emergent materialism, psychophysical parallelism, neutral monism), metaphysical stances on existence (physicalism, substance theory, philosophical realism), and epistemological frameworks such as phenomenal conservatism and radical constructivism.

23 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Causal closure — A metaphysical thesis that every physical event with a cause sufficient for its occurrence has a sufficient physical cause within the physical domain.
• Dempster–Shafer theory — Assign evidential mass to subsets of a frame of discernment, derive belief and plausibility bounds for propositions, and combine appropriately independent evidence with a declared conflict rule.
• Emergent materialism — A philosophy-of-mind position holding that mental properties depend entirely on material systems yet arise as novel, irreducible higher-level properties with autonomous explanatory laws.
• Epiphenomenalism — The philosophy-of-mind view that physical processes cause mental events while mental events exert no causal influence on physical events.
• Epistemic feedback — A feedback relation in which observing, measuring or reporting a phenomenon changes either the phenomenon observed or the subsequent observation method.
• Homeostatic property cluster theory — A theory of natural kinds in which overlapping property clusters are sustained by causal mechanisms without every member sharing one defining essence.
• Neutral monism — Hold that ultimate reality has one fundamental kind whose intrinsic nature is neither mental nor physical, while mental and physical phenomena are derivative organizations or aspects of that neutral basis.
• Noumenon — In Kantian philosophy, an object considered independently of the conditions of sensible intuition, functioning as a limiting contrast to phenomena rather than an object of empirical knowledge.
• Oku (theory) — A Japanese spatial concept of inward depth produced through layered thresholds, indirect approach and progressive revelation in architecture and urban form.
• Participation (philosophy) — A metaphysical relation in which a particular or dependent being has a form, property or reality through an asymmetric dependence on what it participates in.
• Phenomenal concept strategy — A physicalist response to consciousness arguments that locates the apparent explanatory gap in special concepts used to think about experience rather than in an ontological gap.
• Phenomenal conservatism — The epistemic principle that if it seems to a subject that p, that seeming supplies prima facie justification for believing p unless defeated by contrary evidence or reliability concerns.
• Philosophical realism — The stance that entities of a specified kind exist or have facts independently of minds, conceptual schemes, language, or acts of knowing.
• Physicalism — The metaphysical thesis that everything is physical or wholly determined by the physical.
• Prohairesis — The deliberative moral choice or faculty of assent that ancient Greek ethics, especially Epictetus's Stoicism, treats as properly one's own and central to agency and character.
• Psychophysical parallelism — A philosophy-of-mind position holding that mental and bodily event streams correspond systematically without directly causing one another.
• Radical constructivism — An epistemology treating knowledge as viable organization of experience rather than verifiable correspondence with a mind-independent world.
• Radical probabilism — An epistemological view that rational belief is graded throughout and can be revised without treating incoming evidence as a proposition learned with certainty.
• Rationalism — An epistemological position giving reason, intellectual intuition or deduction priority as a source or test of at least some substantive knowledge independently of sensory experience.
• Schema (Kant) — A time-structured rule by which Kant’s imagination mediates between a pure category and sensible appearances.
• Substance theory — An ontological theory in which enduring particulars or substrata bear properties while remaining distinct from those properties.
• Transcendental idealism — Kant’s doctrine that objects of experience appear under a priori forms and categories supplied by cognition, while things in themselves are not thereby known.
• Weak ontology (political concept) — Make political theory's basic claims about human being and world explicit while holding them as historically situated, contestable commitments rather than unrevisable metaphysical foundations.