Category: reduction

Evolving Enactivism: An Introduction

Action / Cognition / Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin: Evolving Enactivism / Philosophy of Mind / reduction

Thanks to John Schwenkler for inviting us to guest-blog this week about our new book Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). It is often said that two minds are better than one. Though ‘mind’ is a count noun, we don’t imagine that people really have …

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2. The Origin of the Universe Argument

Paul Humphreys: Emergence / Philosophy of Science / reduction

Yesterday we saw, via an example from social psychology, that diachronic approaches to emergence can avoid some of the major problems of synchronic approaches. That motivating example is not wholly convincing as an example of transformational emergence. Here is what I believe is a more robustly ontological example. The Standard …

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Explanation and Integration in Mind and Brain Science

Cognition / Explanation / functionalism / Neuroscience; Philosophy of Science / Psychology / reduction

This forthcoming volume, edited by David Kaplan, should be of interest to The Brains Blog community, and it includes papers by fellow contributors Gualtiero Piccinini and Corey Maley:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/explanation-and-integration-in-mind-and-brain-science-9780199685509?cc=us&lang=en&#

 

Our New, Ongoing and Empirically Resolvable Debates over Reduction and Emergence

Carl Gillett: Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy / Concepts / Explanation / functionalism / naturalism / reduction

Some philosophers of science have suggested that scientific discussions of “reductionism” and “emergentism” are merely rhetorical funding grabs. But drawing together my work in earlier parts of the book, in the final section, Part IV, I outline how we are in substantive, ongoing and empirically resolvable scientific debates about the …

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The Scientific Emergentist and her Striking Metaphysical Mutualism

Carl Gillett: Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy / Concepts / Explanation / functionalism / naturalism / reduction

Part III of the book focuses on reconstructing the scientific emergentism of writers like Anderson, Freeman, Laughlin, Prigogine, and others, and providing a theoretical framework for its claims. I argue that scientific emergentism is a philosophically overlooked, and profoundly important position, that I dub ‘Mutualism’ with a range of novel …

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The Scientific Reductionist and her Live Fundamentalist Position

Carl Gillett: Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy / Causation / Concepts / Events / Explanation / functionalism / reduction / Uncategorized

The widespread philosophical view is that reductionism in the sciences is a dead view and perhaps slightly distasteful to boot. As I outlined in an earlier post, the received view assumes that “reductionism” is semantic, or Nagelian, reduction. The goal of such semantic reduction was to show that higher sciences …

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Understanding Compositional Explanations in the Sciences

Attention / Carl Gillett: Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy / Causation / Concepts / Events / Explanation / logic / Metaphysics / metaphysics of mind / Philosophy of Science / reduction

Understanding the nature of “vertical” relations whether in science, nature, mathematics, logic, or anywhere else, is a hot topic in philosophy. What is unfortunate is that, as yet, too little attention is paid to focused issues about what frameworks work best for the “vertical” relations in particular areas. However, it …

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