Beyond Reduction : Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science

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: 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.