Broad’s Emergent Mind and Psychic/Psi Factors

Philosopher C. D. Broad’s theory of consciousness combines a strong doctrine of emergence with a detailed analysis of phenomenal experience and an unusually sustained willingness to allow psychical research to constrain metaphysics. Phenomenal qualities are genuine features of experience that cannot, he argues, be logically deduced from even complete knowledge of the physical constitution and functioning of the brain; on ordinary evidence this makes Emergent Materialism the most reasonable account, but evidence for telepathy, precognition, mediumship, and possible postmortem persistence led Broad to qualify that position with a Compound Theory, according to which the conscious mind may emerge from the organized conjunction of a brain and a further “psychic factor” (Broad, 1925). His extraordinary taxonomy of seventeen logically possible mind-matter theories shows the systematic background to this conclusion: Broad attempts not merely to defend one view but to map virtually the entire metaphysical possibility space of consciousness before asking which theories survive phenomenological, scientific, and potentially paranormal evidence.

Thus, Broad's contribution to consciousness studies is double, and the two halves are more tightly connected than his reputation suggests. In The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), he argued that sensible qualities are emergent: not even a "mathematical archangel" with complete microphysical knowledge could deduce that ammonia smells acrid or that the sky looks blue, because the laws linking such qualities to their physical bases are irreducibly trans-ordinal. Decades later, as twice president of the Society for Psychical Research (UK), he specified the domain of the paranormal by reference to "basic limiting principles"—background assumptions about mind, knowledge, and causation so deep that scientific theory presupposes rather than implies them (Broad, 1949). Two of those principles are claims about phenomenal consciousness itself, its privacy and its dependence on a living brain, which is why Broad treated psi not as a fringe curiosity but as the only available empirical test of structural assumptions that philosophy of mind otherwise takes for granted.

Emergence and the Mathematical Archangel

Broad frames his inquiry as a generalization of the mechanism-versus-vitalism dispute: are the apparently different kinds of material objects irreducibly different? On a mechanistic view, the properties of a whole follow from those of its parts and their arrangement; on an emergent view, they do not. Emergent properties are linked to their bases by trans-ordinal laws—laws connecting one compositional level to another—discoverable empirically but never deducible from below.

Sensible qualities are Broad's central case. The archangel, granted unlimited mathematical powers and microscopic perception, could deduce that ammonia must have the microstructure it has, but could not deduce its smell (Broad, 1925). Chalmers (2003) identifies this as a direct predecessor of the knowledge argument, and notes that Broad's book contains recognizable versions of all three epistemic arguments against materialism—knowledge, conceivability, and explanatory. Chalmers also identifies the lacuna: Broad does not consider that the gap might be epistemic without being ontological, an option that structures the contemporary debate. McLaughlin (1992) treats Broad as the culmination of British emergentism, and dates the movement's decline to the quantum-mechanical explanation of chemical bonding, which removed the standard non-mental examples.

Phenomenal Experience and Representative Perception

Broad begins from the reality and specificity of phenomenal experience. In perception, we encounter colors, sounds, smells, tastes, bodily sensations, and other qualitative appearances. His representational realism distinguishes the physical object perceived from the immediately presented sensory content or sensum: an obliquely viewed circular coin, for example, may present an elliptical visual sensum while nevertheless being perceived as a circular physical object (Broad, 1914, 1925). Experience thus contains both an immediately qualitative component and an “external reference” through which consciousness presents a world extending beyond its sensory appearances. Later Broad characterized the primitive relation of immediate sensory presentation as “prehension” (Broad, 1952).

This matters because Broad never treats consciousness merely as behavior, information processing, judgment, or discrimination. Something is phenomenally presented. Illusion and hallucination reinforce the distinction: the occurrence and character of a conscious appearance need not guarantee the existence of an external object possessing corresponding properties. Broad’s theory therefore gives first-person phenomenal facts an evidential standing that any metaphysics of mind must preserve and, to be successful, explain.

His analysis of temporal consciousness follows the same methodological principle. Broad investigated the “specious present,” memory, temporal becoming, and degrees of presentedness, treating the temporal organization of experience as genuine data requiring explanation rather than as something automatically dissolved by physical description (Broad, 1923). Phenomenology does not dictate metaphysics, but metaphysics must accommodate phenomenology.

Broad’s Seventeen Possible Theories of Mind and Matter

Broad's method is what makes the psi material philosophically serious. It is in the final chapter of The Mind and Its Place in Nature that Broad constructs what remains one of the most comprehensive systematic classifications of mind-body theories ever attempted. He argues that exactly seventeen metaphysical theories of the mind-matter relation are theoretically possible, generated by cross-classifying two attributes, mentality and materiality, against four possible statuses. A differentiating attribute is simple and unanalyzable and marks off a fundamental kind of substance. An emergent characteristic genuinely applies to things but cannot be deduced from the properties of their parts. A reducible characteristic applies and can be so deduced. A delusive characteristic seems to some or all observers to apply to something but in fact applies to nothing. Three great divisions follow—both attributes differentiating, one differentiating and one not, neither differentiating—and successive subdivision yields the seventeen. Broad names each, then eliminates by argument.

In other words, Broad asks of mentality and materiality whether each is fundamental, emergent, reducible, or merely apparent. A differentiating attribute is genuinely instantiated and metaphysically fundamental—not reducible to or emergent from anything more basic. An emergent characteristic genuinely exists but appears only when more fundamental constituents enter appropriate organizations; a reducible characteristic genuinely exists but can in principle be analyzed in terms of more fundamental characteristics; a delusive characteristic seems to be instantiated but in fact applies to nothing (Broad, 1925).

Broad obtains seventeen alternatives, although three pairs share family names, yielding fourteen labels. His terminology differs substantially from contemporary usage: notably, Spinoza counts as a “dualist” because Thought and Extension are two irreducible attributes even though Spinoza is a substance monist. Broad’s classification is therefore a taxonomy of the metaphysical status of mental and material attributes, not simply a classification by number of substances (Broad, 1925; Van Cleve, 2001).

1. Dualism of Compatibles (1,1). Mentality and materiality are both fundamental differentiating attributes, but the same substance can possess both. Broad identifies Spinoza as the paradigm: mental and physical characteristics are mutually irreducible without requiring two separate substances. Broad regards this as coherent, but it makes mentality primitive rather than explaining why it appears only in certain highly organized natural systems. Since Broad sees no compelling contradiction in a thing’s possessing both mental and physical attributes, this possibility also weakens the standard argument from irreducibility to Cartesian substance dualism (Broad, 1925; Van Cleve, 2001).
2. Dualism of Incompatibles (1,2). Mentality and materiality are again fundamental, but nothing can possess both; mental and material characteristics therefore require distinct bearers. Descartes is Broad’s principal exemplar. Broad accepts it as logically serious but rejects the claim that mental and material properties have been shown intrinsically incompatible. Thus, phenomenal irreducibility alone does not establish a separate mental substance. Cartesian dualism remains possible, especially if survival evidence eventually requires it, but ordinary mind-brain dependence gives Broad no reason to adopt it prematurely (Broad, 1925).
3. Pure Mentalism (2,12). Mentality is fundamental, whereas materiality is delusive: reality is genuinely mental, and what appears to be an independently material world ultimately is not. Berkeley and some other idealists approximate this position. Unlike Pure Materialism, Pure Mentalism is not self-refuting for Broad: if apparent physical objects prove ultimately nonmaterial, the appearances themselves can still be genuine mental events. He nevertheless sees the position as highly revisionary and regards the success and systematic structure of physical science as giving strong reason not to discard materiality unless forced to do so (Broad, 1925; Van Cleve, 2001).
4. Pure Materialism (2,22). Materiality is fundamental and mentality is delusive—roughly an ancestor of contemporary eliminativism about consciousness. Broad regards this as immediately self-contradictory. If mentality is supposedly an illusion, there must at least be seeming, misperceiving, or misjudging; but seeming, perceiving, and judging are themselves mental occurrences. One cannot eliminate phenomenal or cognitive mentality by calling it an illusion because the existence of the illusion reinstates precisely what the theory denies (Broad, 1925). This is one of Broad’s clearest arguments for treating conscious appearance as an irreducible datum.
5. Emergent Mentalism (2,111). Mentality is fundamental, while materiality genuinely exists but emerges from a fundamentally mental reality. This is a distinctive idealist-emergent possibility: physicality is real rather than illusory, but ontologically derivative from mental fundamentals. Broad regards it as logically possible, though it sacrifices one principal attraction of emergence—the prospect of explaining why mentality appears at particular levels of physical organization—because mentality has already been made fundamental. More generally, Broad argues that treating mentality as a differentiating attribute simply relocates rather than explains its occurrence (Broad, 1925).
6. Reductive Mentalism (2,112). Mentality is fundamental while materiality is genuine but reducible to mental characteristics—for example, by analyzing physical objects entirely in terms of actual and possible experiences. This resembles phenomenalist reconstructions of matter, although Broad observes that actual phenomenalists do not always fit his category cleanly. Broad believes Reductive Mentalism can be positively refuted: analyses in terms of experience fail fully to reconstruct the distinctive features required for materiality, including the public, persistent, mind-independent structure attributed to physical objects. He knew of no philosopher who straightforwardly held the position exactly as defined (Broad, 1925; Van Cleve, 2001).
7. Emergent Materialism (2,211). Materiality is fundamental and mentality is a genuinely novel emergent characteristic of certain sufficiently organized material systems. This is Broad’s preferred theory if only ordinary evidence is considered. Consciousness depends lawfully upon brain organization, yet phenomenal properties cannot be reduced to neural properties or predicted from lower-level physical laws. Psychophysical relations therefore involve fundamental “trans-ordinal” laws discovered empirically after mentality appears. This theory preserves both neurological dependence and phenomenal irreducibility without postulating a pre-existing mental substance (Broad, 1925). It is the pivotal position in Broad’s philosophy.
8. Reductive Materialism (2,212). Materiality is fundamental and mentality reduces without remainder to bodily characteristics. Broad associates its contemporary form with Behaviorism and distinguishes “molar” reduction to overt behavior from “molecular” identification with internal neural processes. He regards both as inadequate. We infer other minds partly from behavior, but we know our own experiences directly rather than by observing our bodily movements; moreover, physical predicates applicable to neural events—for example spatial, quantitative, or dynamical properties—do not simply mean the same thing as phenomenal predicates such as experiencing red or feeling pain. Consciousness therefore cannot be analyzed away into behavior or physiology (Broad, 1925; Van Cleve, 2001).
9. Emergent Neutralism (3,11). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental; both emerge from a more basic reality that is intrinsically neither mental nor material. Broad associates Samuel Alexander with an important version in which both arise from more fundamental spatiotemporal characteristics. This is a genuine alternative to both materialism and idealism: phenomenal consciousness emerges, but not from matter, because matter itself is emergent. Broad takes the position seriously. Its explanatory burden is to characterize the neutral basis richly enough to account independently for the emergence of both physical structure and phenomenal mentality without covertly importing either at the fundamental level (Broad, 1925; Van Cleve, 2001).
10. Reductive Neutralism (3,13). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental, and both are reducible to a more basic neutral reality. This is the most thoroughly reductionist form of neutral monism. Mental and physical descriptions organize the same underlying nonmental, nonmaterial elements in different ways. Broad considers such neutralist approaches logically coherent and potentially economical because they avoid privileging either side of the mind-body relation. Their difficulty is substantive rather than formal: the neutral basis must be specified so that both the qualitative immediacy of consciousness and the apparently objective structure of matter genuinely follow from it rather than being assumed under different terminology.
11. Mixed Neutralism A (3,121). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental; mentality is emergent, whereas materiality is reducible to neutral fundamentals. The physical world can therefore be constructed from the neutral basis, but phenomenal consciousness appears only when those fundamentals are configured in special higher-order ways. This has affinities with modern neutral-monist approaches that give consciousness genuine strong-emergent status while treating physical structure as derivative. Broad regards it as coherent; phenomenally, it has the attraction of acknowledging the novelty of consciousness without making conventional matter the ultimate ontological ground.
12. Mixed Neutralism B (3,122). Neither is fundamental; mentality is reducible, while materiality is emergent from the neutral basis. This reverses the preceding theory. Conscious experience contains nothing ontologically novel beyond the neutral constituents, whereas physical materiality emerges only through their organization. Broad does not find it self-contradictory, but it is comparatively ill-suited to his own insistence that qualitative experience resists reductive derivation. It would need to show precisely how phenomenal characteristics can be analyzed into neutral characteristics while physical organization nevertheless introduces genuine novelty.
13. Mentalistic Neutralism A (3,211). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental; mentality is emergent from a neutral basis, while materiality is delusive. The world genuinely contains conscious or mental characteristics, but what we ordinarily describe as matter is ultimately a misleading appearance. Broad regarded versions of Russell’s neutralism as approaching this sector of the taxonomy, depending on how Russell’s neutral events and constructions are interpreted. The theory avoids the self-refutation that afflicts theories denying mentality, because phenomenal appearances remain real, but it incurs the major revisionary cost of denying that materiality as ordinarily understood is instantiated.
14. Mentalistic Neutralism B (3,212). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental; mentality is reducible to neutral characteristics, while materiality is delusive. Here both conventional matter and fundamental mentality disappear from the ground floor, but conscious phenomena survive as reducible organizations of neutral elements. Broad regards this as logically possible. Its central challenge is whether phenomenal consciousness can truly be reconstructed out of constituents characterized as nonmental without the reduction quietly presupposing precisely the qualitative features it is meant to explain.
15. Materialistic Neutralism A (3,221). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental; materiality emerges from neutral reality and mentality is delusive. Broad rejects it immediately for the same reason as Pure Materialism. Whatever the status of matter or the neutral substrate, the claim that consciousness merely seems to exist entails actual seeming or judging and therefore entails mentality. Adding a neutral ontological level cannot rescue eliminativism about consciousness from this reflexive problem (Broad, 1925).
16. Materialistic Neutralism B (3,222). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental; materiality is reducible to neutral reality while mentality is delusive. Broad again rejects the theory as self-contradictory. Whether matter is fundamental or derivative makes no difference to the decisive objection: a universe in which consciousness falsely appears to exist is already a universe containing appearances and thus some form of mentality. Broad eliminates both forms of Materialistic Neutralism at the outset (Broad, 1925).
17. Pure Neutralism (3,3). Neither mentality nor materiality is fundamental, emergent, or reducible; both are delusive characteristics. Reality is exclusively neutral, while both mind and matter merely seem to characterize it. Broad again regards the mental half of the proposal as self-refuting: if both categories are illusions, the occurrence of the illusion itself entails mentality. Pure Neutralism therefore fails before questions concerning its account of matter even arise (Broad, 1925).

Broad thus immediately eliminates four theories because they make mentality delusive—Pure Materialism, both Materialistic Neutralisms, and Pure Neutralism—and claims to refute two more, Reductive Mentalism and Reductive Materialism. Of the remaining eleven, he gives especially serious consideration to dualist, mentalist, neutralist, and emergent alternatives, but the cumulative evidence from ordinary experience and science leads him toward Emergent Materialism. To summarize his reasoning: mentality plainly exists; it is not successfully reducible to physical or behavioral characteristics; there is no compelling reason to declare it fundamental at every ontological level; therefore its emergence from sufficiently organized systems is the strongest ordinary hypothesis (Broad, 1925; Dewalque, 2024).

The importance of this taxonomy for consciousness studies is considerable. Broad anticipates much of the contemporary possibility space: eliminative physicalism, reductive physicalism, strong emergence, idealism, substance and attribute dualisms, neutral monism, Russellian strategies, and combinations in which mental and physical properties have asymmetric ontological status. His seventeen theories are not seventeen theories he endorses; they constitute a deliberately exhaustive logical matrix against which phenomenal consciousness can function as a discriminator.

Strong Emergence and the Qualitative Gap

Broad’s best-known positive contribution is his formulation of strong emergence. Higher-level characteristics may depend completely and lawfully on a lower-level configuration while nevertheless being impossible to deduce, even in principle, from complete knowledge of the constituents, their arrangement, and the laws governing them in other circumstances. The connection is therefore nomological but not reducible (Broad, 1925; McLaughlin, 1992).

Phenomenal consciousness supplies Broad’s strongest example. As noted, his “mathematical archangel” might possess exhaustive physical and mathematical knowledge of ammonia molecules, sensory receptors, nerves, and the human brain. Yet if the archangel had never smelled ammonia, Broad argues, no amount of physical deduction would reveal what ammonia smells like. Likewise, physical knowledge of the mechanisms of vision would not by itself enable a creature wholly lacking visual experience to anticipate the phenomenal appearance of color (Broad, 1925).

This strikingly anticipates later knowledge arguments about qualia, especially Jackson’s Mary argument, although the argumentative purposes differ. Broad takes the non-deducibility primarily as evidence that psychophysical connections involve fundamental emergent laws rather than ordinary physical reduction. The neural configuration determines the experience, but the qualitative character of that experience cannot be inferred from lower-level facts before encountering the psychophysical law and the phenomenal property itself.

Broad was careful not to infer Cartesian dualism directly from this epistemic asymmetry. The inability to deduce smell from molecular and neural description establishes a gap between types of characteristics; it does not establish that the characteristics must belong to separate substances. This is why Emergent Materialism remains possible: phenomenal properties can be real, irreducible, and dependent on material systems without being independently existing mental substances.

The Compound Mind and the Psychic Factor

Broad’s conclusion in 1925 is explicitly conditional: if only “normal” facts were considered and alleged paranormal facts were rejected, Emergent Materialism would be, in his judgment, the most reasonable theory (Broad, 1925). But Broad did not believe philosophers were entitled simply to discard all ostensibly paranormal evidence. If some of that evidence were genuine, ordinary emergent materialism might be incomplete.

His resulting Compound Theory proposes that the conscious mind may emerge from the conjunction of two components: the living brain-and-nervous-system and a further psychic factor. Crucially, this psychic factor should not simply be equated with a fully formed Cartesian soul. Neither component by itself needs to possess the characteristic organization of a conscious person. Much as properties of a compound can arise only when its constituents are appropriately combined, ordinary consciousness, memory, reasoning, affect, and personality may belong to the organized compound rather than to either factor separately (Broad, 1925).

This enables Broad to preserve the overwhelming evidence for brain dependence while leaving conceptual room for anomalous phenomena. Brain injury, intoxication, sensory stimulation, and ordinary physiology can profoundly modify consciousness because the brain is an indispensable constituent of the normal conscious compound. Yet if some psychic factor can temporarily persist after bodily death or enter unusual relations with another organism, certain mediumistic or survival phenomena might become possible without implying that the entire ordinary personality exists independently of the brain.

Broad therefore distinguishes persistence of a psychic factor from survival of the person. Genuine personal survival would require much more—continuity of memory, dispositions, character, cognitive organization, and other features constitutive of an individual mind. A postmortem residue or factor would not by itself establish immortality (Broad, 1925, 1955, 1962).

This is an essential qualification to the common description of Broad as simply an emergent materialist. His considered position was closer to: emergent materialism is the best theory on ordinary evidence; if sufficiently strong psychical evidence is admitted, a Compound Theory in which mentality emerges from brain-plus-psychic-factor may be preferable. Broad explicitly regarded such a Compound Theory as potentially compatible with Emergent Materialism, depending on the ultimate nature of the psychic factor (Broad, 1925).

Psi, Survival, and Basic Limiting Principles

Broad’s lifelong investigation of psychical research followed directly from this methodological openness. He regarded telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, mediumship, apparitions, and survival claims as potentially important, not because such anomalies were completely credible, but because established anomalies could falsify assumptions tacitly built into dominant philosophies of mind.

In his 1949 essay “The Relevance of Psychical Research to Philosophy,” Broad called such assumptions Basic Limiting Principles. These include restrictions concerning causal order, the means by which one mind can acquire information about another, the dependence of mental events upon living brains, and the normal sensory routes by which knowledge of physical events is obtained. An “ostensibly paranormal” phenomenon is significant because it appears, prima facie, to violate one or more such background principles (Broad, 1949).

Thus, genuine telepathy would suggest acquisition of information from another mind without ordinary sensory mediation; clairvoyance would suggest information about external events without conventional sensory access; precognition could challenge assumptions about temporal and causal asymmetry; convincing mediumistic communication could bear on whether organized mental characteristics can persist after bodily death. Broad was substantially more skeptical about psychokinesis than about some forms of extrasensory cognition, illustrating that his interest in psychical research was discriminating rather than an acolyte acceptance of paranormal claims (Broad, 1949, 1962).

His procedure is methodological and conditional. First determine whether the reported phenomenon occurred; exclude fraud, observational error, coincidence, sensory leakage, and ordinary causal explanations; ask whether known agents operating under known laws suffice; and only if they do not should new laws or new kinds of causal factor be considered. His philosophical point is that a phenomenon cannot legitimately be rejected merely because it violates a metaphysical principle whose universality is precisely what the phenomenon would call into question.

The Ψ/Psi-Component and Dispositional Survival

Broad's most original contribution to the survival debate is an analysis of what would have to persist. Personality consists largely of dispositions—memories, traits, skills—not occurrent experiences. But dispositions require categorical grounds, and we can attach no clear sense to a persistent purely mental structure; so the categorical basis of personality appears to reside in brain structure, and its post-mortem persistence appears impossible (Broad, 1962, pp. 414–415).

His proposed escape is a Ψ/Psi-component: a constituent of the human compound, not open to ordinary observation, carrying some part of the organized dispositional basis and modified during life by experience and training. Crucially, Broad denies that the Ψ/Psi-component would by itself be a person, or even be associated with any stream of experience at the level of a cat or an oyster; personality, and even the lowliest actual experience, may require its association with a living organism (Broad, 1962, p. 415). The proposal thus separates the carrier of psychological structure from the subject of phenomenal consciousness and posits only the former as separable—arguably, a more disciplined position than popular dualism, conceding that experience may be organism-dependent even if personality is not. Sudduth (2016) subjects the argument to detailed critique.

Ψ/Psi Caveats and Theory-Selection Instrument

There is, however, a crucial historical caveat. Some evidence Broad regarded as strong did not survive later scrutiny. He placed considerable weight on S. G. Soal’s ESP experiments, but Betty Markwick’s later analysis produced evidence that Soal had manipulated experimental data (Markwick, 1978). This substantially weakens part of Broad’s empirical case and illustrates why his conclusions about psi cannot simply be taken at face value.

Yet the methodological issue is separable from the empirical verdict. Broad’s principle remains: a theory of consciousness should be responsive to the total evidence, including well-established anomalous evidence if such evidence exists, rather than defining anomalies out of existence by physicalist or naturalist presupposition. Conversely, extraordinary reports do not warrant metaphysical revision until ordinary explanations and methodological defects have been rigorously excluded, a high hurdle as later history has shown.

This gives psychical research a direct relation to phenomenal consciousness. If conscious experience is invariably generated by currently functioning neural processes, then phenomenally conscious cognition should neither persist without those processes nor acquire information independently of physically recognized channels. If rigorously established cases showed otherwise, the evidential balance among Broad’s seventeen theories would change. Psi is therefore not an eccentric appendix to Broad’s philosophy of mind—it is potentially a theory-selection instrument, and, as such, it motivates Landscape’s Anomalous & Altered States category.

Assessment and Legacy

Broad’s lasting importance comes from integrating four projects that later philosophy often separates: rigorous description of phenomenal experience, systematic enumeration of mind-body metaphysics, strong emergence, and empirical openness to apparently anomalous phenomena. The ammonia example anticipates the explanatory gap and knowledge arguments; the seventeen-theory taxonomy anticipates much of the contemporary map of physicalism, dualism, idealism, and neutral monism; and the Compound Theory shows how anomalous evidence could, in principle, revise a theory otherwise strongly constrained by neurophysiology.

Broad’s position also resists simple classification. He is not a Cartesian dualist because he sees no need for a separately conscious substance on ordinary evidence. He is not a reductive physicalist because phenomenal consciousness cannot be analyzed into physical characteristics. He is not simply a strong emergent materialist (i.e., Non-Reductive Physicalist) because his ultimate assessment explicitly leaves room for a psychic factor motivated by psychical research. And he is certainly not a paranormal dogmatist or missionary: his entire method depends on distinguishing what would follow if anomalous phenomena were securely established from whether any particular evidence actually succeeds.

For contemporary consciousness studies, Broad’s deepest methodological lesson may therefore be the conjunction of phenomenological realism and metaphysical fallibilism. The qualitative existence of consciousness cannot coherently be eliminated; its properties must not be assumed reducible simply because they correlate with brain states; but neither phenomenal irreducibility nor anomalous reports license an immediate leap to a nonphysical substance. Competing ontologies are to be differentiated by the broadest and most rigorously evaluated body of evidence available.

The weaknesses are real. The laboratory evidence in the Lectures leans heavily on Soal's card-guessing experiments, subsequently discredited as fraudulent. Broad dismissed psychokinesis and physical mediumship on thin grounds, judging that at least ninety-nine percent of such reports were misdescribed or fraudulent, and so never engaged the cases that would most have tested him. And the archangel argument sidesteps the possibility of an epistemic gap without an ontological one.

What survives is substantial: the earliest sustained epistemic case against physicalism from phenomenal quality; trans-ordinal laws as an ancestor of psychophysical bridging laws; a still-unmatched specification of what psi would actually cost the standard picture of mind; the dispositional reframing of survival; and a demonstration that anomalous phenomena can be treated with full analytic rigor by someone who is both impartial and passionate.

Placement

While Broad is classified here in the Anomalous & Altered States category, he might well have beenin Non-Reductive Physicalism. He argued that phenomenal consciousness is real and irreducible: even complete physical knowledge of a brain could not reveal what an experience—such as smelling ammonia—feels like. His strong emergentism therefore held that consciousness may arise lawfully from complex physical organization while possessing genuinely novel qualitative properties. Broad systematically compared 17 possible mind-matter theories, favoring Emergent Materialism on ordinary evidence. However, taking psychical research seriously led him toward a Compound Theory in which consciousness might emerge from the conjunction of brain and a further “psychic factor.” Telepathy, precognition, mediumship, and survival evidence were therefore potentially crucial tests of whether consciousness exceeds normal neural constraints—possibilities Broad investigated rigorously but conditionally, without claiming paranormal phenomena established.Thus, Broad would have fit securely and comfortably in Non-Reductive Physicalism—were it not for his unusual turn bringing psychical research into the argument. Hence, he is classified here in the Anomalous & Altered States category. Finally, Broad’s 17-theory section can be considered a progenitor of this Landscape

References

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Broad, C. D. (1923). Scientific Thought. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

Broad, C. D. (1925). The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

Broad, C. D. (1949). The relevance of psychical research to philosophy. Philosophy, 24(91), 291–309. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100007452

Broad, C. D. (1952). Some elementary reflexions on sense-perception. Philosophy, 27(100), 3–17.

Broad, C. D. (1953). Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research: Selected Essays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Broad, C. D. (1955). Human Personality and the Possibility of Its Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Broad, C. D. (1962). Lectures on Psychical Research: Incorporating the Perrott Lectures Given in Cambridge University in 1959 and 1960. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dewalque, A. (2024). The Varieties of Monism: C. D. Broad. Paper presented at the 25th World Congress of Philosophy, Rome.

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Markwick, B. (1978). The Soal-Goldney experiments with Basil Shackleton: New evidence of data manipulation. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 56, 250–277.

McLaughlin, B. P. (1992). The rise and fall of British emergentism. In A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim (Eds.), Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism (pp. 49–93). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Van Cleve, J. (2001). C. D. Broad. In A. P. Martinich and D. Sosa (Eds.), A Companion to Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.