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 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

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)