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515Reducing mind to molecular pathways: Explicating the reductionism implicit in current cellular and molecular neuroscience (review)Synthese 151 (3): 411-434. 2006.As opposed to the dismissive attitude toward reductionism that is popular in current philosophy of mind, a “ruthless reductionism” is alive and thriving in “molecular and cellular cognition”—a field of research within cellular and molecular neuroscience, the current mainstream of the discipline. Basic experimental practices and emerging results from this field imply that two common assertions by philosophers and cognitive scientists are false: (1) that we do not know much about how the brain wor…Read more
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211The philosophy of neuroscienceStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2006.Over the past three decades, philosophy of science has grown increasingly “local.” Concerns have switched from general features of scientific practice to concepts, issues, and puzzles specific to particular disciplines. Philosophy of neuroscience is a natural result. This emerging area was also spurred by remarkable recent growth in the neurosciences. Cognitive and computational neuroscience continues to encroach upon issues traditionally addressed within the humanities, including the nature of …Read more
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190The Oxford handbook of philosophy and neuroscience (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2009.The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience is a state-of-the-art collection of interdisciplinary research spanning philosophy (of science, mind, and ethics) and current neuroscience. Containing chapters written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in this area, and in some cases co-authored with neuroscientists, this volume reflects both the breadth and depth of current work in this exciting field. Topics include the nature of explanation in neuroscience; whether and how cu…Read more
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181Empirical evidence for a narrative concept of selfIn Gary D. Fireman, T. E. McVay & Owen J. Flanagan (eds.), Narrative and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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181Precis of Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (3): 231-238. 2005.This book precis describes the motives behind my recent attempt to bring to bear “ruthlessly reductive” results from cellular and molecular neuroscience onto issues in the philosophy of mind. Since readers of this journal will probably be most interested in results addressing features of conscious experience, I highlight these most prominently. My main challenge is that philosophers (even scientifically-inspired ones) are missing the nature and scope of reductionism in contemporary neuroscience …Read more
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157The previous decade has seen renewed critical interest in the multiple realization argument. These criticisms constitute a "second wave" of challenges to this central argument in late-20th century philosophy of mind. Unlike the first wave, which challenged the premise that multiple realization is inconsistent with reduction or type identity, this second wave challenges the truth of the multiple realization premise itself. Since psychoneural reductionism was prominent among the explicit targets o…Read more
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155Understanding neural complexity: A role for reduction (review)Minds and Machines 11 (4): 467-481. 2001.Psychoneural reduction is under attack again, only this time from a former ally: cognitive neuroscience. It has become popular to think of the brain as a complex system whose theoretically important properties emerge from dynamic, non-linear interactions between its component parts. ``Emergence'' is supposed to replace reduction: the latter is thought to be incapable of explaining the brain qua complex system. Rather than engage this issue at the level of theories of reduction versus theories …Read more
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152Mental anomaly and the new mind-brain reductionismPhilosophy of Science 59 (2): 217-30. 1992.Davidson's principle of the anomalousness of the mental was instrumental in discrediting once-popular versions of mind-brain reductionism. In this essay I argue that a novel account of intertheoretic reduction, which does not require the sort of cross-theoretic bridge laws that Davidson's principle rules out, allows a version of mind-brain reductionism which is immune from Davidson's challenge. In the final section, I address a second worry about reductionism, also based on Davidson's principle,…Read more
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129What's Old Is New Again: Kemeny-Oppenheim Reduction at Work in Current Molecular NeurosciencePhilosophia Scientiae 17 (2): 89-113. 2013.We introduce a new model of reduction inspired by Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model [Kemeny & Oppenheim 1956] and argue that this model is operative in a “ruthlessly reductive” part of current neuroscience. Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model was quickly rejected in mid-20th-century philosophy of science and replaced by models developed by Ernest Nagel and Kenneth Schaffner [Nagel 1961], [Schaffner 1967]. We think that Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model was correctly rejected, given what a “theory of reduction” w…Read more
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110New wave psychophysical reductionism and the methodological caveatsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (1): 57-78. 1996.A number of influences have combined to make reductionism an unpopular position in recent philosophy of mind and psychology. Davidson’s Principle of the Anomalousness of the Mental, the multiple realizability arguments of Putnam, Fodor, and others, and attempts to characterize supervenience or dependency as the appropriate nonreductive relation to seek between psychological and physical kinds are the most well-known objections. And these have found their mark. Being a psychophysical reductionist…Read more
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108Psychoneural Reduction: The New WaveBradford. 1998.One of the central problems in the philosophy of psychology is an updated version of the old mind-body problem: how levels of theories in the behavioral and brain sciences relate to one another. Many contemporary philosophers of mind believe that cognitive-psychological theories are not reducible to neurological theories. However, this antireductionism has not spawned a revival of dualism. Instead, most nonreductive physicalists prefer the idea of a one-way dependence of the mental on the physic…Read more
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96A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 262-264. 2007.
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86The structuralist program has developed a useful metascientific resource: ontological reductive links (ORLs) between the constituents of the potential models of reduced and reducing theories. This resource was developed initially to overcome an objection to structuralist ``global'' accounts of the intertheoretic reduction relation. But it also illuminates the way that concepts at a higher level of scientific investigation (e.g., cognitive psychology) become ``structured through reduction'' to lo…Read more
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83Marr and ReductionismTopics in Cognitive Science 7 (2): 299-311. 2015.David Marr's three-level method for completely understanding a cognitive system and the importance he attaches to the computational level are so familiar as to scarcely need repeating. Fewer seem to recognize that Marr defends his famous method by criticizing the “reductionistic approach.” This sets up a more interesting relationship between Marr and reductionism than is usually acknowledged. I argue that Marr was correct in his criticism of the reductionists of his time—they were only describin…Read more
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81RepliesPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (3): 285-296. 2005.I reply to challenges raised by contributors to this book symposium. Key challenges include (but are not limited to): distancing my new account of reductionism-in-practice from my previous “new wave” account; clarifying my claimed “heuristic” status for higher-level investigations (including cognitive-neuroscientific ones); defending the “reorientation of philosophical desires” I claim to be required by my project; and addressing consideration about normativity
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80Psychoneural reduction of the genuinely cognitive: Some accomplished factsPhilosophical Psychology 8 (3): 265-85. 1995.The need for representations and computations over their contents in psychological explanations is often cited as both the mark of the genuinely cognitive and a source of skepticism about the reducibility of cognitive theories to neuroscience. A generic version of this anti-reductionist argument is rejected in this paper as unsound, since (i) current thinking about associative learning emphasizes the need for cognitivist resources in theories adequate to explain even the simplest form of this ph…Read more
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80Molecular neuroscience to my rescue (again): Reply to looren de Jong and SchoutenPhilosophical Psychology 18 (4): 487-494. 2005.In their review essay (published in this issue), Looren de Jong and Schouten take my 2003 book to task for (among other things) neglecting to keep up with the latest developments in my favorite scientific case study (memory consolidation). They claim that these developments have been guided by psychological theorizing and have replaced neurobiology's traditional 'static' view of consolidation with a 'dynamic' alternative. This shows that my 'essential but entirely heuristic' treatment of higher-…Read more
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78The molecules of social recognition memory: Implications for social cognition, extended mind, and neuroethicsConsciousness and Cognition 17 (2): 468-474. 2008.Social cognition, cognitive neuroscience, and neuroethics have reached a synthesis of late, but some troubling features are present. The neuroscience that currently dominates the study of social cognition is exclusively cognitive neuroscience, as contrasted with the cellular and increasingly molecular emphasis that has gripped mainstream neuroscience over the past three decades. Furthermore, the recent field of molecular and cellular cognition has begun to unravel some molecular mechanisms invol…Read more
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73Multiple realizability and psychophysical reductionBehavior and Philosophy 20 (1): 47-58. 1992.The argument from multiple realizability is that, because quite diverse physical systems are capable of giving rise to identical psychological phenomena, mental states cannot be reduced to physical states. This influential argument depends upon a theory of reduction that has been defunct in the philosophy of science for at least fifteen years. Better theories are now available
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66Connectionism, reduction, and multiple realizabilityBehavior and Philosophy 23 (2): 29-39. 1995.I sketch a theory of cognitive representation from recent "connectionist" cognitive science. I then argue that (i) this theory is reducible to neuroscientific theories, yet (ii) its kinds are multiply realized at a neurobiological level. This argument demonstrates that multiple realizability alone is no barrier to the reducibility of psychological theories. I conclude that the multiple realizability argument, the most influential argument against psychophysical reductionism, should be abandoned
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64From sensory neuroscience to neurophilosophy: Reflections on llinas and Churchland's mind-brain continuumPhilosophical Psychology 10 (4): 523-530. 1997.Philosophers and psychologists seeking an accessible introduction to current neuroscience will find much value in this volume. Befitting the neuroscientific focus on sensory processes, many essays address explicitly the binding problem. Theoretical and experimental work pertaining to the “temporal synchronicity” solution is prominent. But there are also some surprising implications for current philosophical concerns, such as the intemalism/extemalism debate about representational content, episte…Read more
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58A Brief History of Neuroscience's Actual Influences on Mind-Brain ReductionismIn Hill Christopher & Gozzano Simone (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical, Cambridge University Press. pp. 88. 2012.
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49Vector subtraction implemented neurally: A neurocomputational model of some sequential cognitive and conscious processesConsciousness and Cognition 9 (1): 117-144. 2000.Although great progress in neuroanatomy and physiology has occurred lately, we still cannot go directly to those levels to discover the neural mechanisms of higher cognition and consciousness. But we can use neurocomputational methods based on these details to push this project forward. Here we describe vector subtraction as an operation that computes sequential paths through high-dimensional vector spaces. Vector-space interpretations of network activity patterns are a fruitful resource in rece…Read more
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Mississippi State UniversityDepartment of Philosophy & Religion
Neurobiology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Mississippi Medical CenterProfessor
University of California, Irvine
PhD, 1989
Starkville, Mississippi, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |