Reductionism in Cognitive Science

2006

Within philosophical literature, higher-level cognitive concepts such as free will, authorship of actions, and conscious control are often questioned. Neurological and biochemical mechanisms underlying human behavior provide alternative explanations of action. Reduction of cognitive states to neurophysiologic states shows that higher-level cognitive concepts in principle can be eliminated, replacing them by neurophysiologic concepts. In contrast, in this paper it is shown how reduction relations can be used in a constructive manner to strengthen the scientific foundation of higher-level cognitive concepts and further develop higher-level theories in which these concepts play a role.

2006

Developing Higher-Level Cognitive Theories by Reduction Tibor Bosse ([email protected]), Catholijn M. Jonker 1 ([email protected]), Jan Treur 2 ([email protected]) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands can be used to strengthen the usefulness and further development of the higher-level theory. This position acknowledges the achievements of neuroscience and shows how to exploit these results where possible, in favour of higher-level concepts instead of against them. This paper shows how this perspective provides a scientific and philosophical foundation for higher-level notions. A practical method, based on formal techniques and tools, is proposed to support the perspective. The method will result, among others, in relational specifications of the functional role and of the representational content of these concepts; cf. Kim (1996, 1998, 2005). The method allows to check whether these specifications are...

Ontos Verlag, 2011

The notion of reduction continues to play a key role in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science. Supporters of reductionism claim that psychological properties or explanations reduce to neural properties or explanations, while antireductionists claim that such reductions are not possible. In this book, I apply recent developments in philosophy of science, particularly the mechanistic explanation paradigm and the interventionist theory of causation, to reassess the traditional approaches to reduction in philosophy of mind. I then elaborate and defend a pluralistic framework for philosophy of mind, and show how reductionist ideas can be incorporated into it. This leads to a novel synthesis of pluralism and reductionism that I call pluralistic physicalism.

Psychological Inquiry, 2011

According to , "the purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions" (Krukow, Nielsen, & Sassone, 2008, p. 3782). Given the rich and insightful commentaries we received, our approach to the reduction problem can be considered a success in this respect. The commenters have taken our ideas and expanded them both in breadth and depth. They have also critically examined the assumptions of our approach. In general, the commentaries suggest that the implementation of conceptually guided psychometric models is viable, is empirically tractable, and can be improved and revised on the basis of empirical and conceptual advances. Most important, they show that psychometric models yield increased depth and precision in dialogues concerning the foundational questions of cognitive neuroscience. In this rejoinder, we address the core points of criticism and present an expansion of the ideas we formulate in the Kievit et al. (this issue) target article, based on the ideas and suggestions offered by the commenters. Our focus is on the following set of themes that figured centrally in the comments: (a) What is the role of mechanisms with respect to our approach, (b) what explanatory levels should we study; (c) why should we engage in reductive science in the first place, (d) how can psychometric models be extended, (e) what interpretations of causality and realism are relevant for psychometric models, and (f) what philosophical positions can be translated into measurement models.

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2005

The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, 2019

Reductionism is one of the most divisive concepts in the popular and philosophical lexicon. Over the past century it has been championed, declared dead, resurrected, and reformed many times over. Its resilient, protean character reflects the circumstances of its birth in the polarizing mid-20 th century debates over the unity of science. While the totalizing ideal of unified science has lost its luster, localized reductionist projects continue to flourish. In this chapter I sketch the goals and methods of one prominent form of reductionism within the mindbrain sciences and consider the prospects for non-reductionist alternatives.

2006

This is a first tentative examination of the possibility of reinstating reduction as a valid candidate for presenting relations between mental and physical properties. Classical Nagelian reduction is undoubtedly contaminated in many ways, but here I investigate the possibility of adapting to problems concerning mental properties an alternative definition for theory reduction in philosophy of science. The definition I offer is formulated with the aid of non-monotonic logic, which I suspect might be a very interesting realm for testing notions concerning localized mental-physical reduction. The reason for this is that non-monotonic reasoning by definition is about appeals made not only to explicit observations, but also to an implicit selection of back- ground knowledge containing heuristic information. The flexibility of this definition and the fact that it is not absolute, i.e. that the relation of reduction may be retracted or allowed to shift without fuss, add at least an interesting alternative factor to current materialist debates.

2013

Nous, 2002

The current stand-off between reductionists and anti-reductionists about the mental has sparked a long-overdue reexamination of key issues in philosophical methodology. 1 The resulting debate promises to advance our understanding of how empirical discoveries bear on the numerous philosophical problems which involve the analysis or reduction of kinds. The parties to this debate disagree about how, and to what extent, conceptual facts contribute to justifying explanatory reductions.

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, 1983

Inspite of the great success in many disciplines the program of reductionism has failed its genuine purpose. Systemtheory however has yielded a new concept of reducfionism which we call reductionism by correspondence and which may imply a new understanding of the mind-body problem. The crucial operations of reductionism by correspondence are called idealization, interpretation and classification. They are used to optimize the description of a system. Nevertheless they lead to certain deficiencies which cannot be avoided in principle. We are therefore driven to the assumption that natural systems can only be described as probabilistic systems. From this point of view nothing is said about the direction of the reduction.