The Explanatory Gap: A Narrative Review of the Mind-Body Problem from Dualism to Eliminativism
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) August 30, 2026 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22172145 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Review Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key findings | Argues that the mind-body problem persists due to a structural tension between physical causal completeness and first-person phenomenology, and that philosophy's role is to map the limits of explanation rather than solve the problem. |
Abstract
The mind-body problem---how conscious experience relates to the physical brain---remains philosophy's sharpest unsolved boundary question. This article presents a narrative review of the positions that define the debate: Descartes's substance dualism, Ryle's category-mistake critique, the mind-brain identity theory of Smart, Putnam's multiple realizability and functionalism, Davidson's anomalous monism, Nagel's 1974 phenomenological challenge, Jackson's knowledge argument, Churchland's eliminative materialism, Searle's biological naturalism, Dennett's multiple-drafts model, and Chalmers's 1995 hard problem. The synthesis is organized around three themes: ontology, in which dualist and physicalist frameworks were refined into functionalist and naturalist positions; explanation, in which the phenomenal character of experience resisted reduction; and method, in which eliminativism, naturalism, and pragmatism proposed different treatments of the explanatory gap. It is concluded that the debate's persistence reflects a genuine structural tension---causal completeness of physics versus first-person phenomenology---and that contemporary philosophy's task is less to solve the problem than to map precisely where and why explanation runs out.