Robert N. McCauley

Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory

Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies that microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and antireductionists fear offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including identities) justify while overlooking their fundamental role in promoting scientific research. A brief review of research on visual processing provides support for the explanatory pluralists general model of cross-scientific relations and discloses the valuable heuristic role hypothetical identities play in cross-scientific research. That model also supplies grounds for hesitation about the correlation objection to the psychophysical identity theory and complaints about an explanatory gap in physicalist accounts of consciousness. These takes on psycho-neural connections miss both the sorts of considerations that motivate hypothetical identities in science and their fundamental contribution to progressive research. Thus, their focus on the contributions of research at multiple levels of analysis does not bar explanatory pluralists from considering heuristic identity theory (HIT). Arguably, it encourages it.

Susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer Illusion, Theory-Neutral Observation, and the Diachronic Penetrability of the Visual Input System

Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions–-especially the Müller-Lyer illusion–-as a principal form of evidence for the informational encapsulation of modular input systems. Fodor proposed that these modules’ stereotypical deliverances about how the world appears could serve as a theory-neutral observational foundation for (scientific) knowledge. For a variety of reasons Fodor rejected Paul Churchlands putative counter-examples to these mental modules’ cognitive impenetrability. Fodors discussions suggest that demonstrating modules’ cognitive penetrability would hinge on showing that because subjects either (a) acquire some explicit theory or (b) gain wider perceptual experience, they would, in the synchronic case, very quickly cease to experience the illusion or, at any rate, experience a mitigated version of it. Diachronic penetration, by contrast, would involve processes that deliver one of these outcomes over a decidedly longer period. Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits’ (1966) research across seventeen cultures shows that culturally influenced differences in visual experience during the first two decades of life substantially affect how people experience the Müller-Lyer stimuli. In some of the societies most people were virtually immune to the illusion. Such findings call Fodors showcase evidence for the cognitive impenetrability of the visual input system into question and, thereby, threaten to block the path to the theory-neutral, observational consensus that he scouts.

Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology

In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchlands eliminativism operates on three claims: (1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories, (2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and (3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience is just such a context. I argue that a more detailed account of intertheoretic relations, which distinguishes between the relations that hold between successive theories at a particular level of analysis over time and those that hold between theories at different levels of analysis at the same time, offers grounds for denying Churchlands second and third claims and, therefore, undermines his eliminativism. The paper concludes by suggesting why it is, nonetheless, not unreasonable, given this more detailed model of intertheoretic relations, to expect the eventual elimination of common sense psychology.

Reduction: Models of cross-scientific relations and their implications for the psychology-neuroscience interface

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the philosophical problem of reduction, in particular the question of whether psychology can be reduced to neuroscience. Scientist argues against antireductionist views that psychology is independent of neuroscience and also against ultra-reductionist views that see psychology as being replaced by neuroscience. The explanatory pluralism and heuristic identity theory provide rich and plausible models of interdisciplinary developments. Exploring reductive possibilities opens new avenues for sharing methodological, theoretical, and evidential resources. Successful reductions generate the productive programs of research at the analytical levels from which the candidate theories hail, squaring the lower-level mechanical details with the upper-level phenomenal patterns and refining common understanding of both in the bargain. The chapter discusses the Nagels standard model of reduction and the way the machinery of the new-wave model of reduction has transformed one of the standard models principal problems into a virtue. The chapter reviews the criticisms of the new-wave model, suggesting that its proximity to the logical empiricist model on two fronts renders it insufficiently sensitive to the wide range of cross-scientific relations that arise.

Time is of the essence: Explanatory pluralism and accommodating theories about long-term processes

Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. Explanatory pluralism accommodates a wider range of connections between theories and inquiries in science than all-purpose models of reduction do. Consequently, it provides analytical tools for understanding the roles of the theoretical proposals about the evolution of the human mind/brain that have proliferated over the last two decades. Those proposals have testable implications pertaining to both structure and processing in the modern human mind/brain. An example of such research illustrates how those proposals and investigative tools and experiments cut across both explanatory levels and modes of analysis within the cognitive sciences and how those studies can yield evidence that bears on the assessment of competing theories and models.

Epistemology in an age of cognitive science

Abstract Like the logical empiricists many contemporary philosophers wish to bring the determinateness of scientific judgment to epistemology. Recent efforts to naturalise epistemology (such as those of the Churchlands) seem to jeopardise the position of epistemology as a normative discipline. Putnam argues that attempts to naturalise epistemology are self‐refuting. My goal is not to defeat the project for the naturalisation of epistemology, but rather to help clarify what it does and does not amount to. I maintain that attempts to completely eliminate the normative will be either forever incomplete or inimical to the progress of science. However, because it is the first horn of this dilemma which will prevail, these considerations do not undermine the importance of future epistemology carefully attending to the results of the relevant sciences.

Why science is exceptional and religion is not: A response to commentators on Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not

Chapter One Natural Cognition Chapter Two Maturational Naturalness Chapter Three Unnatural Science Chapter Four Natural Religion Chapter Five Surprising Consequences References

Truth, Epistemic Ideals and the Psychology of Categorization

Recent theoretical work on the psychology of categorization emphasizes the role cognitive constructs play in perception and categorization. This approach supports Putnams rejection of metaphysical realism. However, the experimental findings concerning basic level categories, in particular, suggest that robust stabilitites among our systems of empirical concepts persist in the face of considerable theoretical diversity and change. These stabilities undermine Putnams strongest negative conclusions concerning the correspondence theory of truth (once it is uncoupled from metaphysical realism). The centrality of a correspondence criterion of truth (in a larger theory of truth) is psychologically inescapable, rationally indispensable, and (therefore) epistemologically fundamental.

The impact of successful scientific theorizing on conceptualizing religion

Empirically successful scientific theories are intellectual hurricanes. They flood lowlands set aside for worries about definitions. They carry away philosophical reflections that are less dense than the accumulated scientific findings that give these storms their strength, and they fundamentally reshape the conceptual landscape. The history of scholarship reveals that once an empirically corroborated scientific theory explains and predicts phenomena in some domain noticeably better than the available alternatives (whether those alternatives are scientific theories or not), among experts at least, the process of conceptualizing those phenomena, thereafter, mostly floats along on the surface of debates about the comparative scientific merits of that theory and its competitors. Earlier debates about definitions lose most of their interest until new theories arise that generate new, less easily managed empirical findings in the pertinent domains. Across the centuries, the fates of such concepts as ‘inertia’ and ‘planet’ are fitting illustrations of these patterns, as are, more recently, the fates of such concepts as ‘gene’ and ‘deciding’ (aka ‘decision making’). The quandary for humanists in our time is how to manage the fact that humans’ mental lives and actions and the social and cultural arrangements that they constitute have increasingly become objects of just such penetrating scientific proposals and investigations. Humanists are right (although sometimes for the wrong reasons) that such scientific accomplishments will supplant neither their disciplines nor their questions nor their concerns nor their values nor, even, many of their substantive commitments. Because of their misplaced fears about the reduction of all things bright and beautiful, however, too many humanists fail to grasp the incredible resources and opportunities that these scientific investigations offer for enriching our understandings of ourselves and of our social worlds (McCauley, 2007). Appreciating those resources and opportunities (as opposed to fearing them) depends upon humanists recognizing that scientific explanations are always partial. Popular ideology to the contrary notwithstanding, science is always theoretical through and through. (Some theories are just more controversial than others.) Science can never tell the whole story about anything, at least if it is to continue to remain science. In carrying out their research, scientists mostly address parts of the world from the perspectives their theories create. Otherwise, scientists and everyone else address them from the perspective of theories that they have inherited. Whether those theoretical inheritances are biological or cultural, we are almost always unaware of them and of their influences on our judgments. I assume that these claims about biological inheritances that amount to largely unacknowledged theoretical perspectives are part of what Benson Saler has in mind when he comments (2008, p. 222) about the ‘evolutionary. aspects’ of the human condition in his explication of the fourth principle guiding how he conceptualizes religion. With his fourth and first principles, I have no quarrels. Saler’s second and third principles, however, fail to allow for the audacity that scientific conjectures are capable of. Neither those two principles nor Saler’s reading of my and Tom Lawson’s comments about conceptualizing religion in our first book, Rethinking Religion (1990), reflect sufficient appreciation of the wallop that victorious scientific theories carry for matters of conceptualization that I have scouted above. The basic problem is that Saler nowhere explicitly grants, although I suspect that he often assumes, the fundamental game-changing role that empirically successful scientific theories play in battles about concepts and definitions. I suspect he assumes it, first, because his first principle cites, approvingly, Karl Popper’s (1962/1992) deflationary comments about the importance of definitions and concerns about the meanings of terms, relative to the importance of the empirical evaluation of scientific theories. Moreover, when Saler (2008, p. 222) announces that his interest is in a ‘model’ of ‘religion in general,’ it is but another way of saying that he seeks a wide-ranging explanatory theory capable of cutting through all of the diversity and complexity that his third principle (properly) stresses. That third principle does not quite go far enough, however. It fails to acknowledge how, in the course of an explanatory theory’s empirical evaluation, its on-going corroboration can entitle it, at least provisionally, to what often initially appear (to more conventional scholars) to be sweeping oversimplifications that cut through that diversity and complexity. Examples from the history of science abound. Newton’s theory explained how everything, from a feather’s free fall, to a canon ball’s trajectory, to the motions of the planets, conforms to the same principles of motion. In contemporary neuroscience, discoveries about the mechanisms of neuronal interaction and about the role of neurotransmitters, in particular, offer insights about topics as diverse as psychopathologies, psychopharmacology, mood, and working memory. Recent speculations in evolutionary psychology threaten to unearth a hitherto unexpected, underlying conceptual unity among features of human behavior as varied as mate selection, resource distribution, disgust, linguistic facility, discriminative parental solicitude, biological essentialism, morning sickness, face recognition, cheater detection, conditional inference, and the fear of snakes and spiders! Newly triumphant scientific theories often recast how we organize large parts of the world conceptually. In an age of science it is always the on-going empirical corroboration of a wide-ranging explanatory theory that proves the preferred ground (at least in the long run) for decisions about how to deploy the key concepts in some domain. For scholars, if not for common folk, empirically successful theories change the rules. Consequently, I fear that the second principle guiding Saler’s conceptualizing of religion (2008, p. 222), which mandates that a definition ‘ought to satisfy ‘‘the criterion of intra-cultural intuitivity’’.’ may underestimate the

Cross-Scientific Study and the Complexity of Psychology

Woodward and Devonis wish to raise a number of developments in the philosophy of science over the past decade to the attention of historians of psychology. New models of science’s structure and development may substantially alter historiography in their field. Eschewing both the logical empiricists, preoccupations with the axiomatization of theories in their rational reconstructions of scientific knowledge, and the Kuhnians’ subsequent preoccupation with the radical incommensurability that scientific revolutions allegedly inject into science, philosophers such as Bechtel, Darden, Laudan, Maull, Nickles, and others have promoted analyses that focus variously on (1) construing scientific progress in terms of ongoing problem solving power, (2) examining the role of scientific discovery in the justification of scientific accomplishments, and (3) analyzing the character and complexity of cross-scientific relations (beyond mere intertheoretic considerations) that contribute to both problem solving and discovery. It is the third of these items that most occupies the authors’ attention.