Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia, by Jon Day, Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative, by Paul B. Armstrong Available to Purchase

“Every sentence of psychology,” Rudolf Carnap (1959: 165) wrote in “Psychology in Physical Language” (1932), “may be formulated in physical language. . . . This is a sub-thesis of the general thesis of physicalism to the effect that physical language is a universal language, that is, a language into which every sentence may be translated.” This reductive physicalism was fundamental to Carnap’s early efforts to unify the sciences. And in “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)” (1974), Jerry Fodor did his best to shut it down. Of course Fodor isn’t the only philosopher to reject reductionism. See W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953) and Hilary Putnam’s “Psychological Predicates” (1967) for other examples. But for my purposes here Fodor’s rejection is the most relevant. In short, his point is that even if you could demonstrate one-to-one correspondences between psychology and physics—a...