Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science
Steven Horst
Abstract
Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind‐between reductionists, dualists, nonreductive materialists, and eliminativists‐have been based upon the perception that mental phenomena like consciousness and intentionality are uniquely irreducible. The “explanatory gap” between mind and body seems to be an urgent and fascinating problem if one assumes that intertheoretic reductions are the rule in the special sciences, with the mind as the lone exception. While this debate was going on in philosophy of mind, however, philosophers of science were rejecting this very sort of reductionism: intertheore ... More
Contemporary debates in philosophy of mind‐between reductionists, dualists, nonreductive materialists, and eliminativists‐have been based upon the perception that mental phenomena like consciousness and intentionality are uniquely irreducible. The “explanatory gap” between mind and body seems to be an urgent and fascinating problem if one assumes that intertheoretic reductions are the rule in the special sciences, with the mind as the lone exception. While this debate was going on in philosophy of mind, however, philosophers of science were rejecting this very sort of reductionism: intertheoretic reductions are not ubiquitous but rare. This book argues that post‐reductionist philosophy of science poses problems for all the familiar positions in philosophy of mind and calls for a deep rethinking of the problematic. To this end, a new perspective, Cognitive Pluralism, is urged.
Keywords:
mind,
philosophy of mind,
philosophy of science,
naturalism,
reduction,
explanatory gap,
Cognitive Pluralism,
explanation,
metaphysics,
dualism,
nonreductive materialism,
Mysterianism,
pluralism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195317114 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2007 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195317114.001.0001 |
