From New Wave Reduction to New Wave Metascience

My discussion in the next two sections draws on Bickle (2000).Google Scholar

Carl Craver has pointed out to me that stressing this observation might be useful in breaking down some of the communication barriers that still exist between neuroscientists and philosophers. Current philosophers as a group are not a horde of substance dualists—as the introductory chapters in many neuroscience textbooks suggest or imply!Google Scholar

See Churchland, P.M. (1987, 58-59) for some simple examples.Google Scholar

In my (1998) I took folk psychology to be the theory with which our common sense ontology of mind is affiliated. A number of commentators took me to task for this, including Bontley (2000), Hannan (2000), Richardson (1999), and Stephan (2001). 1 accept their criticisms (although in Bickle 2001 I try to explain why [took this view]. Nothing hinges on this change for the advantages of the “Intertheoretic Reduction reformulation” of the mind-body problem about to be stressed.Google Scholar

I treat this point in detail in my first book, including providing examples of “linguistic” arguments still in vogue in some philosophical circles today that are irrelevant to theory reduction issues in science. See Bickle (1998, Chapter 2, section 3, especially pages 44-45).Google Scholar

Hooker (1981) provides a nice introduction to these details. I capture some of these details within a quasi-formal account of the intertheoretic reduction relation (Bickle 1998, chapters 2 and 3).Google Scholar

This is the same example I employed, independently, in Bickle (1995b) and (1998, chapter 5). My use of this case to illustrate an actual psychoneural reduction goes back to my doctoral dissertation (Bickle 1989).Google Scholar

With regard to both of these first two features, Schaffner is implying that not only is Nagel’s account of intertheoretic reduction incapable of handling psychology-to-neuroscience theory relations, but that the very account of “theory” he presupposed is wrong for these cases, also. Thanks to John Symons for calling this point to my attention.Google Scholar

For this reason, I’ve changed the symbol Hooker (1981) uses to denote the “analog structure.” Unfortunately, he chooses the symbol T_R*.Google Scholar

In Bickle (1998, 30), I provide a diagram of these isomorphic spectra with these historical reductions located on both.Google Scholar

In Bickle (1992b) and (1998, chapters 5 and 6) I offer empirical evidence for a future revisionary reduction of psychological to neuroscientific theories. There I argue that while a synaptic weight-vector based account of cognitive content drawn from cognitive and computational neuroscience eschews the prepositional contents of belief-desire psychology, it nevertheless preserves the coarse-grained functional (cause-and-effect) profile and the intentionality that the latter ascribes to cognitive states, especially to states near the sensory and behavioral (motor) peripheries.Google Scholar

Key papers are reprinted in Putnam (1975a). Tn Bickle (1999) I review key themes in the literature that Putnam initiated, but see my (1998, chapter 4) for a more detailed, technical discussion.Google Scholar

I’ll describe this argument more completely in Chapter Three, section 4.Google Scholar

1 introduced these terms in Bickle (1992a) and expounded them further in Bickle (1998, chapter 4).Google Scholar

I explicate this account further in Bickle (1992a) and apply it to a psychoneural example in Bickle (1998, chapter 4).Google Scholar

Trent Jerde points out to me that a great majority of PET and fMRI studies use voxel sizes in the 3 X 3 X5 mm range; voxel sizes of 1 mm or less almost always refer to anatomical images. And even this much grosser “standard working resolution” for functional images requires statistical techniques that “smooth the data” or require the presence of “contiguous active voxels” to assert a claim about significant activation. I don’t disagree. There is much guff about functional neuroimaging in both the popular press and philosophical discussions. The study I’ll report in detail in Chapter Three below uses both the much less impressive voxel sizes he cites and a variety of statistical “smoothing” techniques. But Scott Holland also informs me that recent high-field magnets (e.g., 7 Tesla), now approved only for research on laboratory animals, can get far smaller functional resolution than even 1 mm.Google Scholar

“Offhand reference”? I spent twenty pages (in my 1998, chapter 5) explaining the psychological and neuroscientific details of associative learning, hierarchically structured memory, and experience-driven synaptic plasticity, as these theories stood in the early 1990s. I then spent most all of chapter 6 drawing consequences from these details for the realismeliminativism debate about propositionally structured content.Google Scholar

These are not the only challenges to new wave reductionism in print. Others will arise later in this book.Google Scholar

Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Carnap in the remainder of this chapter are from his ([1950] 1956). I indicate them only by page number.Google Scholar

Notice that many of my questions go beyond what Carnap considered “internal questions.” Many will notice Kuhnian themes in my list. This is another sense in which new wave metascience isn’t merely logical positivism revived. The distinction I am stressing is Carnapinspired, not Carnap’s.Google Scholar

The philosophy of science (minus the ontology) in Bickle (1998, chapters 2 and 3) can be reinterpreted in light of new wave metascience as providing alternatives to Carnap’s quaint notions and translational strategy.Google Scholar

Thanks to Carl Craver and Dingmar van Eck for insisting that I elaborate on this important methodological difference between new wave metascience and more mainstream philosophy of science.Google Scholar