The Matter of the Mind

The Matter of the Mind addresses and illuminates the relationship between psychology and neuroscience by focusing on the topic of reduction.

• Written by leading philosophers in the field
• Discusses recent theorizing in the mind-brain sciences and reviews and weighs the evidence in favour of reductionism against the backdrop of recent important advances within psychology and the neurosciences
• Collects the latest work on central topics where neuroscience is now making inroads in traditional psychological terrain, such as adaptive behaviour, reward systems, consciousness, and social cognition.

Contributors vii

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

1 Mind Matters: The Roots of Reductionism 1
Maurice Schouten and Huib Looren de Jong

Part I Metaphysics of Science 29

2 Functionalism and Psychological Reductionism: Friends, Not Foes 31
Andrew Melnyk

3 Some Metaphysical Anxieties of Reductionism 51
Thomas W. Polger

4 The Metaphysics of Mechanisms and the Challenge of the New Reductionism 76
Carl Gillett

5 Reductionism, Embodiment, and the Generality of Psychology 101
Lawrence A. Shapiro

Part II Philosophical Accounts of Reductionism, Mechanism, and Co-evolution 121

6 Reduction without the Structures 123
Robert C. Richardson

7 Reinforcing the Three “R”s: Reduction, Reception, and Replacement 146
Ronald Endicott

8 Reducing Psychology while Maintaining its Autonomy via Mechanistic Explanations 172
William Bechtel

9 Enriching Philosophical Models of Cross-Scientific Relations: Incorporating Diachronic Theories 199
Robert N. McCauley

Part III Mechanisms of Mind 225

10 Coupling, Emergence, and Explanation 227
Andy Clark

11 Is Psychological Explanation Going Extinct? 249
Cory D. Wright

12 Who Says You Can’t Do a Molecular Biology of Consciousness? 275
John Bickle

13 Mind Reading and Mirror Neurons: Exploring Reduction 298
Huib Looren de Jong and Maurice Schouten

Name Index 323

Subject Index 326

“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.” (Metapsychology, 14 May 2013)

Maurice Schouten is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tilburg. He is co-author of research articles in Theory & Psychology, New Ideas in Psychology, Zygon, Philosophical Psychology, Synthese, and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Huib Looren de Jong is Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Naturalism and Psychology (1992) and Theoretical Issues in Psychology (2006, with Sacha Bem), and a number of research articles. He serves as Associate Editor of Theory & Psychology.

The Matter of the Mind addresses and illuminates fundamental questions about the relationship between psychology and its associated disciplines by focusing on the topic of reduction.

After decades of an “antireductionist consensus” in the sciences, reductionism has become credible, even fashionable, again due first to new empirical evidence supporting reductionist claims, and secondly to a “new wave” model of reduction which overcomes many of the conceptual difficulties which previously discredited it. These original articles, written by expert philosophers on the subject of reduction, discuss recent theorizing in the mind-brain sciences, and review and weigh the evidence in favor of the new wave of reduction against the backdrop of recent important advances within psychology and the neurosciences. This volume collects the latest work on central topics where neuroscience is now making inroads in traditional psychological terrain, such as adaptive behavior, reward systems, consciousness, and social cognition.