physicalistic materialism

…basic idea of his “physicalism,” according to which all terms and statements of empirical science—from the physical to the social and historical disciplines—can be reduced to terms and statements in the language of physics.

ideas of 20th-century behaviourism and physicalism, Comte assumed that psychology, such as it was in his day, should become a branch of biology (especially of brain neurophysiology), on the one hand, and of sociology, on the other. As the “father” of sociology, Comte maintained that the social sciences should proceed…

…principle at least, to a physicalist thesis, according to which all science should be modelled upon the so-called exact sciences and all scientific knowledge should be reducible, ultimately, to statements made about the properties of the physical world. The reason for his pessimism concerning the prospects for the study of…

… and Carnap preferred that a physicalistic thing-language be employed as the starting point and testing ground of all knowledge claims. Propositions in this language would describe objectively existing, directly observable states of affairs or events. Because all objective and intersubjective knowledge was seen, in such a physicalism, to rest on…

This sort may be called physicalistic materialism. Such a materialist allows the concept of material thing to be extended so as to include all of the elementary particles and other things that are postulated in fundamental physical theory—perhaps even continuous fields and points of space-time. Inasmuch as some cosmologists even…

Physicalism, on the other hand, is the view that mathematics is about concrete physical objects of some sort. Advocates of this view agree with Platonists that there exist such things as numbers and sets, and, unlike adherents of psychologism, they also agree that these things…