Meta Ontology

In this paper, I investigate how different views about the vertical andhorizontal structure of reality affect the debate between reductive andnonreductive physicalism. This debate is commonly assumed to hinge onwhether there are high-level, special-science properties that are distinct fromlow-level physical properties and whether the alleged multiple realizabilityof high-level properties establishes this. I defend a metaphysical interpretationof nonreductive physicalismin the absence of both of these assumptions.Adopting an independently motivated, discipline-relative account of naturalproperties and appealing to a phenomenon I call ''multiple determinativity,''in which a single physical property simultaneously realizes different kindsof special-science properties, is sufficient to show that some special-scienceproperties are irreducible to physical properties and that nonreductivephysicalism is not merely a terminological variant of reductive physicalism.