Abstract
In a recent paper, Gualtiero Piccinini and Carl Craver have argued that psychology is not distinct from neuroscience. Many have argued that Piccinini and Craver’s argument is unsuccessful. However, none of these authors have questioned the appropriateness of Piccinini and Craver’s argument for their key premise—that functional analyses are mechanism sketches. My first and main goal in this paper is to show that Piccinini and Craver offer normative considerations (on what functional analyses should be) in support of what is a descriptive premise and to provide some guidelines on how to argue for this premise. My second goal is to show that the distinctness question should be of great significance for philosophy of cognitive science.
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Notes
For a review, see Stinson and Sullivan (2018).
I will depart from them in one respect. On which more in the next subsection.
For a recent review of research on face recognition in neuroscience, see McGugin and Gauthier (2016).
Unless stipulated otherwise, italics in quotes are the authors'.
Their individuation is semantic in the sense that they are individuated by their inferential role.
Unless stated otherwise, “mechanism sketch” should be read accordingly in what follows.
If one wants to call this thesis an eliminativist thesis, one has to bear in mind that this is not the kind of elimination the Churchlands, for example [in, among other texts, (Churchland 1981) and (Churchland 1986)] had in mind. (Sketch) is about functional analyses intentionally individuated. The Churchlands, however, talked about theories (folk psychology as a theory was at the center of their attention) and therefore individuated psychological explanations semantically.
One would expect someone who thinks that (Sketch) doesn't apply to the psychology literature to agree that it applies to the neuroscience literature (assuming that one finds in this literature explanatory contexts in which no neural terms are used). Someone could deny that and could even go further and argue that in explanatory contexts in which no neural terms are used, neuroscientists always offer functional analyses as characterized. (In doing so, they would deny the existence of mechanism sketches in contexts in which no neural terms are used, not of mechanism sketches per se.) Now, and this is the reason why I mention this possibility in the first place, this might suggest that the argument I have put forward at the beginning of this subsection for the conclusion that “mechanism sketch” should be given an intentional reading in the context of this paper is flawed. The objection would be that this argument begs the question in that it presupposes the existence of mechanism sketches in contexts in which no neural terms are used. Note, however, that this argument presupposes, not that they exist, but that Piccinini and Craver believe that they exist (or, at the very least, should believe that they do). I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this issue.
Here I take a practice to be a regularity in patterns in behaviors that result from shared mental states among the agents who exhibits these behaviors. This could be further precisified, but this will suffice for our present purposes.
Craver's views have developed over time. See (Sheredos 2016, sec. 1) for details, which are irrelevant here.
I use subscripts to distinguish the epistemic sense of “explanation” form the ontic one.
In what follows I will use the noun phrase “functional terms” to designate the terms for components functionally individuated.
What if the presupposition is false? Then, the functional terms have traditionally been taken to refer to the states of being in one of these states. A debate opposes role-functionalists who are of this opinion (Block and Fodor 1972) and realizer-functionalists, like Lewis, who contend that this presupposition is warranted. On this distinction between role-functionalists and realizer-functionalists, see for example (Mclaughlin 2006).
This function or role depends on the kind of theory which is being put forward (e.g. if the theory is computational, the role is a computational role). It should be noted that though functional terms for components (“adder”, “transducer”…) tautologically indicate the function a neural structure has to perform in order to be its referent (an adder adds, a transducer transduces…), a theory usually goes further than this, specifying also how this function is to be performed, that is, in the case of an adder, the algorithm which it follows.
Piccinini and Craver are silent on this point, for obvious reasons: their argument rests on normative considerations and is therefore not meant to be time-sensitive.
By parity of reasoning, when I talk of neuroscience as a discipline, I also mean cognitive neuroscience.
On these norms, see (Bechtel and Richardson 1993).
Here is some textual evidence for my interpretation of Stinson's paper: “It would be uncharitable not to at least consider the possibility that cognitive psychologists might have a good reason for holding on to their models under these circumstances.” (Stinson 2016, 1604), “Furthermore, although the cognitive model turns out to fit quite badly with current neural models, psychologists have not given up their models, contrary to the normative claims made by Piccinini and Craver […].” (Stinson 2016, 1605), “Instead of throwing out cognitive models whose components do not map neatly onto neural working parts, we could heed cognitive psychologists’ repeated pleas that their field does have a legitimate subject matter, and that their models do track robust regularities in the world.” (Stinson 2016, 1608).
There are also, of course, countervailing factors. For example, cognitive psychologists, if they do not want their departments to disappear, will demarcate themselves from cognitive neuroscientists, stressing the distinctness of their explanations (Pylyshyn 1984). A convincing argument for the thesis that functional analyses, if there are such things, are on their way out or soon will be, will have to measure the relative weights of the factors pushing in the direction of indistinctness and the factors pushing away from it.
Piccinini and Craver's discussion of the camshaft (Piccinini and Craver 2011, 301–302) and of the general purpose computer (Piccinini and Craver 2011, 294–296) might suggest that Piccinini and Craver run an alternative argumentative line, namely, that functional analyses are mechanism sketches because their proponents have their implementation in mind when offering them (it is therefore likely that they use black boxes and filler terms to refer to neural structures). I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this interpretation. Whether this is a good way to interpret Piccinini and Craver is unclear to me. Indeed, in their conclusion to the section in which they discuss the general purpose computer, Piccinini and Craver rehearse the underdetermination argument I have presented. In any case, this argument is flawed. That engineer who build combustion engines and computers intend to refer to mechanisms when using black boxes and filler terms is one thing, that psychologists do so is another. Psychologists are not engineers. They aren't in the business of conceiving things and, as a consequence, they need not be thinking about neural structures. This alternative argument rests on a mistaken analogy.
As the recent publication of an edited book on the topic attests (Kaplan 2017b).
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and/or discussions I thank audiences at the Seventh Ernst Mach Workshop in Prague (with special thanks to Nikola Andonovski and Jesse Prinz) and the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society for the Metaphysics of Science in Milan (with special thanks to Lena Kästner, my commentator, Carl Gillett, Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro). I also thank Marcin Miłkowski and Michael Murez for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Lastly, many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments on this paper.
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Bantegnie, B. Psychology and Neuroscience: The Distinctness Question. Erkenn 87, 1753–1772 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00272-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00272-x