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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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159The 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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156Understanding 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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82RepliesPhenomenology 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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Philosophy of mind and the sciencesIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2002.
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Science of Research and the Search for the Molecular Mechanisms of Cognitive FunctionsIn John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and neuroscience, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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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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Structuralist Contributions – and Limitations? – to the Study of Scientific ReductionMetatheoria 2 (2): 1-23. 2012.Structuralism provides useful resources for advancing our understanding of the intertheoretic reduction relation and its place in the history of science. This paper begins by surveying these resources and assessing their metascientific significance. Nevertheless, important challenges remain. I close by arguing that the reductionism implicit in current scientific practice in a paradigmatic reductionistic scientific field –“molecular and cellular cognition”– is better understood on an “intervene a…Read more
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1The effect of motivation on the stream of consciousness: Generalizing from a neurocomputational model of cingulo-frontal circuits controlling saccadic eye movementsIn Ralph D. Ellis (ed.), The Caldron of Consciousness: Motivation, Affect and Self-Organization, John Benjamins. pp. 133-160. 2000.
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83Psychoneural 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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16Phenomenology and cortical microstimulationIn David Woodruff Smith & Amie L. Thomasson (eds.), Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 140. 2005.
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153Mental 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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50Vector 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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518Reducing 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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2Criteria for consciousness in the brain: Methodological implications of recent developments in cognitive neuroscienceConsciousness and Cognition 9 (2). 2000.
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35Precis of psychoneural reduction: The new waveGrazer Philosophische Studien 61 (1): 249-255. 2001.
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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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131What'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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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 |