-
1073Medical Models of AddictionIn Don Ross, Harold Kincaid & David Spurrett (eds.), What Is Addiction?, The Mit Press. 2010.Biomedical science has been remarkably successful in explaining illness by categorizing diseases and then by identifying localizable lesions such as a virus and neoplasm in the body that cause those diseases. Not surprisingly, researchers have aspired to apply this powerful paradigm to addiction. So, for example, in a review of the neuroscience of addiction literature, Hyman and Malenka (2001, p. 695) acknowledge a general consensus among addiction researchers that “[a]ddiction can appropriately…Read more
-
1080A Role for Representation in Cognitive NeurobiologyPhilosophy of Science (Supplement) 77 (5): 875-887. 2010.What role does the concept of representation play in the contexts of experimentation and explanation in cognitive neurobiology? In this article, a distinction is drawn between minimal and substantive roles for representation. It is argued by appeal to a case study that representation currently plays a role in cognitive neurobiology somewhere in between minimal and substantive and that this is problematic given the ultimate explanatory goals of cognitive neurobiological research. It is suggested …Read more
-
744Is the Next Frontier in Neuroscience a Decade of the Mind?In Charles T. Wolfe (ed.), Brain theory : essays in critical neurophilosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2014.In 2007, ten world-renowned neuroscientists proposed “A Decade of the Mind Initiative.” The contention was that, despite the successes of the Decade of the Brain, “a fundamental understanding of how the brain gives rise to the mind [was] still lacking” (2007, 1321). The primary aims of the decade of the mind were “to build on the progress of the recent Decade of the Brain (1990-99)” by focusing on “four broad but intertwined areas” of research, including: healing and protecting, understanding, e…Read more
-
537Stabilizing Constructs through Collaboration across Different Research Fields as a Way to Foster the Integrative Approach of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) ProjectFrontiers in Human Neuroscience (00): 00. 2016.In this article, I explain why stabilizing constructs is important to the success of the Research Domain Criteria Project and identify one measure for facilitating such stability.
-
345This paper is a response to a commentary by Walter Glannon (2016, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) on my paper "Stabilizing Constructs Across Research Fields as a Way to Foster the Integrative Approach of the Research Domain Criteria Project".
-
481Reconsidering 'spatial memory' and the Morris water mazeSynthese 177 (2): 261-283. 2010.The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze thro…Read more
-
297Memory consolidation, multiple realizations, and modest reductionsPhilosophy of Science 75 (5): 501-513. 2008.This article investigates several consequences of a recent trend in philosophy of mind to shift the relata of realization from mental state–physical state to function‐mechanism. It is shown, by applying both frameworks to the neuroscientific case study of memory consolidation, that, although this shift can be used to avoid the immediate antireductionist consequences of the traditional argument from multiple realizability, what is gained is a far more modest form of reductionism than recent philo…Read more
-
878Stabilizing Mental Disorders: Prospects and ProblemsIn H. Kincaid & J. Sullivan (eds.), Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds, Mit Press. pp. 257-281. 2014.In this chapter I investigate the kinds of changes that psychiatric kinds undergo when they become explanatory targets of areas of sciences that are not “mature” and are in the early stages of discovering mechanisms. The two areas of science that are the targets of my analysis are cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology.
-
1043Construct Stabilization and the Unity of the Mind-Brain SciencesPhilosophy of Science 83 (5): 662-673. 2016.This paper offers a critique of an account of explanatory integration that claims that explanations of cognitive capacities by functional analyses and mechanistic explanations can be seamlessly integrated. It is shown that achieving such explanatory integration requires that the terms designating cognitive capacities in the two forms of explanation are stable but that experimental practice in the mind-brain sciences currently is not directed at achieving such stability. A positive proposal for c…Read more
London, Ontario, Canada