Inscrutability of Matter

In my seminar we discussed a paper by Galen Strawson, “Real Materialism”. It’s a stimulating paper that contends that experiences should be declared “physical” just as such, without benefit of reduction. We don’t know enough about matter to rule out their being aspects of it–so why not call them “physical”? I appreciate Galen’s premisses but I resist the conclusion. I quite agree that our conception of matter is sketchy at best; as John Foster puts it, matter is “inscrutable”. I even see some force in the thesis that experiences constitute the intrinsic nature of matter (though I don’t in the end agree with it); but I see no point in calling this aspect “physical”. However, Galen gives a nice account of the Russellian thesis about the limitations of our knowledge of material reality. It’s a rather Kantian thesis–with the underlying reality of matter noumenal and our knowledge only capturing its appearance to us.