The roots of reductionism

“The Matter of the Mind” is a book about the thorny issue related to the border between psychology and neuroscience. In the last few years the results of neuroscience have been so astonishing that it became almost impossible not to take them in consideration. A consequence of this is: is there a possibility that psychology will be reduced to neuroscience?

As the editors of the book suggest, “things are changing” and reductionism has become fashionable again. So if you are looking for an introductory book that map the problem in all its complexity The Matter of the Mind is a good choice.

The book is divided in three parts: the first one deals with what is meant by reduction in general, the second one faces the issue about how different theories can be related, and the third one outlines the possibility of reducing psychological phenomena like consciusness or behavior to brains and nerve cells.

Reductionism-in-practice

One of the problem that the editors encounter while approaching reductionism is that on one hand “when higher-level posits cannot be related to real furniture of the world” they can’t be real things “or processes in a causally closed world, can’t really explain anything”. On the other hand “if a higher-level explanation can be related to physical processes, it becomes redundant, since the explanatory work can be done by physics”. (2)

After having sketch out the roots of Nagel’s reductionism and highlighted its problems, the editors presents the new reductionism: “we should let go our philosophers’ fantasies and letting a sense of reduction emerge from the detailed investigations drawn from recent scientific practice”. (15) That is to say that we should look for “reductionism-in-practice”. Many of the authors of the book share a naturalistic view that and understanding of reductive explanation should start in science.

The good side of this book is that contributors are not only philosophers but also psychologists and cognitive scientists which makes “The Matter of the Mind” a nice interdisciplinary work.

Part I

The first paper is by Andrew Malnyk that argues for psychological reductionism, a kind of reductionism in which psychological phenomena are reducible to non-psychological phenomena. Non-psychological phenomena include neurophysiological phenomena, but also phenomena in the environment or in the history of the organism that exhibits the psychological phenomena. In this way according to Malnyk, there would be room for the “reducibility of psychological phenomena that don’t supervene solely on intrinsic and simoultaneous features of the organism exhibiting psychological phenomena.” (37) Malnyk claims that “psychological reductionism is consistent with a broadly functionslist picture of psychological phenomena” by showing that it is consistent with the main claims of the functionalist picture.

After Malnyk, Thomas Polger tells us about the anxieties of reductionism saying that “both reductionism and antireductionism are acute responses to certain metaphysical worries” (51) related to metaphysics and its nature which according to him are misguided. Carl Gillett instead,  supports Kim’s claim that “if reductionists embrace both the metaphysics of science and the nonreductivists’ insights about composition in the sciences, then evidence about realization, and other compositional relations, is transformed into the engine of a new, ontological form of reductionism” (78). Gillett shows that understanding scientific composition does drive to a novel and plausible form of ontological reduction as Kim says.

The first part ends with Lawrence Shapiro‘s threaten about the disintegration of psychology. If, as some researchers of embodies cognition have stated, “psychological processes are embodied in the sense that they intrinsecally comprise bodily processes” then psychology could no longer “generalize over differently embodied organisms if these differences are constitutive of differences in psychology”. (117)

Part II

The second part of the book is about philosophical accounts of reductionism, mechanism and co-evolution. It starts with the comparison between Ernst Nagel’s The Structure of Science and Thomas Kuhn’s The structure of Scientific Revolutions by Robert Richardson. The philosopher underlines differences and similarities arguing for a reductionism which is more focused on dynamics rather than the structures. Ronald Endicott brings us to another kind of reductionism which begins with the ‘General Reduction-Replacement’ concept expressed by Kenneth Shchaffner’s, then turns to the ‘New Wave’ approach developed by Paul and Patricia Churchland and the ends up in a proposal of expanding the picture in a way that “is more receptive to the role that otherwise and in other respects irreducible and irreplaceable theories play in a process of partial reduction, specifically, their token reduction”. (148) His goal is to focus on a more comprehensive “Reduction-Reception-Replacement” model of scientific unification. The second part continues with William Bechtel who claims that the “reductions achieved through mechanistic explanations are in fact compatible with a robust sense of autonomy for psychology and other special sciences”. (174) And it concludes with the attempt of Robert Mc Clauley to review the explanatory pluralist’s principal arguments to then enlarge that view, “taking inspiration from a distinction between two types of inquiry among the science”. (201)

Part III

The last part of the book is in my opinion the most exciting one since it is closely related to the latest results in Cognitive Science. As Andy Clark underlines in his paper “an emphasis on emergent phenomena is highly characteristic of much of the most recent, challenging, and exciting work in Cognitive Sience”. (227) Clark argues that “emergent phenomena requires new modes of explanation and understanding” and these modes do not displace more familiar projects such as homuncular decomposition and representational/computational description” but have to focus on a “variety of tools to understand the multiple aspects real-time, embodied, embedded cognition”. (228)

Following the line of the debate, Cory Wright wonders if psychological explanation is a fossil record while John Bickle argues for the possibility of a “molecular biology of consciusness” (277)

Last but not least, the interesting article by Huib Looren de Jong and Maurice Shouten deals with the difficult issue of reducing mental states and processes to neural states. (For more information about the debate see Karsten Stueber’s “Rediscovering Empathy”, (MIT Press 2006, 2nd edition 2010) How do we know other minds, and where the concepts for mental states come from? 

The Matter of the Mind is a well organized book which hosts contributions on the main subjects about philosophy of mind and it is definitely worthwhile reading.

 

© 2013 Martina Orlandi

 

Martina Orlandi is an M.A. student in Logic, Philosophy and History of Science at University of Florence.