The Matter of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychology, Neuroscience and Reduction

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.

Contributors. Preface and Acknowledgments. 1. Mind Matters: The Roots of Reductionism ( Maurice Schouten and Huib Looren de Jong ). Part I: Metaphysics of Science. 2. Functionalism and Psychological Reductionism: Friends, Not Foes ( Andrew Melnyk ). 3. Some Metaphysical Anxieties of Reductionism ( Thomas W. Polger ). 4. The Metaphysics of Mechanisms and the Challenge of the New Reductionism ( Carl Gillett ). 5. Reductionism, Embodiment, and the Generality of Psychology ( Lawrence A. Shapiro ). Part II: Philosophical Accounts of Reduction, Mechanism, Co–evolution. 6. Reduction without the Structures ( Robert C. Richardson ). 7. Reinforcing the Three "R"s: Reduction, Reception, and Replacement ( Ronald Endicott ). 8. Reducing Psychology while Maintaining its Autonomy via Mechanistic Explanations ( William Bechtel ). 9. Enriching Philosophical Models of Cross–Scientific Relations: Incorporating Diachronic Theories ( Robert N. McCauley ). Part III: Mechanisms of Mind. 10. Coupling, Emergence, and Explanation ( Andy Clark ). 11. Is Psychological Explanation Going Extinct? ( Cory D. Wright ). 12. Who Says You Can′t Do a Molecular Biology of Consciousness? (John Bickle ). 13. Mind Reading and Mirror Neurons: Exploring Reduction ( Huib Looren de Jong and Maurice Schouten ). Name Index. Subject Index.

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 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) "The editors, and the contributors, are to be congratulated. This is the best collection on the nature of intertheoretic reduction ever published, especially as those issues bear on the unfolding relations between the neurosciences on the one hand, and psychology and the social sciences on the other. Thanks to these papers, all of us (yours truly included) are going to be rethinking our views on reduction." Paul M. Churchland, University of California, San Diego "Parties on both sides of the reductionism wars will benefit from this exciting collection. The editors and their contributors well represent the cutting edges of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science regarding the reducibility (or lack thereof) of minds to brains." Pete Mandik, William Paterson University “An outstanding vehicle by which to learn about modern reductionism, the relation of neuroscience to psychology, and how they can cooperate rather than compete.” PsycCritiques