A dogmatic version of physicalism that asserts that only physical entities exist and that all phenomena—including consciousness, meaning, and
society—must be reducible to
physics. It rejects emergent, functional, or pluralist accounts, treating any
non‑physical explanation as crypto‑mysticism. This hard‑narrow stance is often asserted rather than argued, and it dismisses the hard problem of consciousness as a “pseudo‑problem.”
Hard-Narrow Physicalism Example: “He insisted that love is ‘just neurotransmitters’ and that any talk of meaning is illusion. Hard‑narrow physicalism: reducing the rich to the reduced.”
Hard-Narrow Reductionism
A stringent form of reductionism that holds that complex phenomena must be explained entirely by their most
basic physical components, and that higher‑level explanations are at best provisional. It rejects holism, emergence, and systems thinking as unscientific hand‑waving. This reductionism is hard‑narrow because it denies any legitimate autonomy to psychological, social, or biological levels of analysis.
Example: “He claimed that sociology could be reduced to psychology, psychology to biology, biology to
chemistry,
chemistry to
physics—and that anything else was ‘folk theory.’ Hard‑narrow reductionism: the ladder that forgets it leans on nothing.”