physicalistn.adj.
/ˈfɪzᵻkl̩ɪst/, /ˈfɪzᵻkəlɪst/, U.S. /ˈfɪzəkələst/ Philosophy.
A. n.
1. A person who believes that human thought and action is governed by natural and physical laws. Also: gen. a person who believes that all reality is explicable in terms of physical properties and laws.
ΘΚΠ
the mind > mental capacity > psychology > experimental psychology > [noun] > practitioner of
physicalist1859
physiological psychologist1875
psychophysicist1881
psychophysiologist1888
1859 H. Bushnell Nature & Supernat. (1864) i. 23 Physicalists, who, without pretending to deny Christianity, value themselves on finding all the laws of obligation..in the laws of the body and the world.
1972 R. Plant in C. B. Cox & A. E. Dyson 20th-cent. Mind III. iii. 69 The relationship [between behaviour and pain] is not an external, contingent one as the dualist would suggest, nor is it a necessary one as the behaviourist or physicalist would claim.
1973 A. J. Ayer Central Questions of Philos. vi. 126 Materialists, or physicalists as they are now more often called, who deny the existence of mental as opposed to physical events.
1990 S. R. L. Clark Parl. of Souls vii. 151 Cartesians and physicalists..continue to dispute in every human generation.
2. A person who adheres to the theory of physicalism (physicalism n. 2).
ΘΚΠ
the mind > mental capacity > philosophy > theoretical scientific philosophy > [noun] > physicalism > adherent of
physicalist1937
1937 J. R. Firth Tongues of Men ix. 119 Let us turn to the ‘physicalists’ or ‘methodical materialists’ of the Vienna Circle.
1991 J. L. Garfield Meaning & Truth 281 Thus in semantics, physicalists agree that all legitimate semantic terms must be explicable nonsemantically.
B. adj. (attributive).
Of or relating to physicalism.
ΘΚΠ
the mind > mental capacity > philosophy > theoretical scientific philosophy > [adjective] > of or relating to physicalism
physicalistic1930
physicalist1934
1934 Times Lit. Suppl. 5 July 479/1 The paper now translated was first published in 1932..under the title of ‘Physicalist language as the Universal Language of Science’.
1956 A. J. Ayer Probl. Knowl. 214 To apply the physicalist thesis to one's own experiences, is, as it were, to pretend to be anaesthetized.
1992 Isis 83 37 We must make a brief detour to mention one of Watson's important teachers in the United States, the almost fanatical physicalist interpreter of animal behavior Jacques Loeb.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2006; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.adj.1859