Psychologists and neuroscientists often struggle to integrate findings in their respective
domains, a problem due partly to implicitly and explicitly held philosophical positions
on issues of reduction and autonomy across these domains. The present article reviews
how reduction and autonomy have been used in philosophical arguments regarding how
macro-scale findings relate to micro-scale findings across various scientific disciplines.
The present article demonstrates how macro findings are indis…
Read morePsychologists and neuroscientists often struggle to integrate findings in their respective
domains, a problem due partly to implicitly and explicitly held philosophical positions
on issues of reduction and autonomy across these domains. The present article reviews
how reduction and autonomy have been used in philosophical arguments regarding how
macro-scale findings relate to micro-scale findings across various scientific disciplines.
The present article demonstrates how macro findings are indispensable to explanations
of phenomena of interest by (a) providing information regarding higher levels of
organization in mechanisms, (b) including information not contained within certain
micro explanations that (c) provides more general and stable causal explanations
relative to micro explanations in certain situations. The purpose of presenting these
analyses and recommendations is to disabuse psychologists and neuroscientists of
pervasive assumptions that psychology is reducible to biology and that lower level
phenomena (molecular) should be prioritized as somehow more explanatory than
higher level phenomena (behavioral). The article concludes with 3 hypothetical scenarios
from clinical psychology and psychiatry illustrating this critique and providing
a pragmatic approach to clarify the relative roles, and importance, of biological and
psychological data in service of general and stable explanations that are tailored to the
kind of intervention desired.