Beyond Reduction

Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists holdthat it cannot, and that this implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible,
perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science and suggests that a new paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem
domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds.

PREFACE; INTRODUCTION; SECTION I - NATURALISM AND REDUCTIONISM; 1. Varieties of Naturalism: What is a Naturalistic Philosophy of Mind?; 2. Reduction and Supervenience: The Contemporary Problematic in Philosophy of Mind; 3. The Demise of Reductionism in Philosophy of Science; SECTION II; 4. Reductionism and Eliminativism; 5. Dualism and the Explanatory Gaps; 6. Non-Reductive Physicalism and Mysterianism; SECTION III - COGNITIVE PLURALISM; 7. Two Types of Pluralism; 8. The Scope and Plausibility of Cognitive Pluralist Epistemology; 9. Cognitive Pluralism and Modal Metaphysics; 10. Cognitive Pluralism and Naturalism; BIBLIOGRAPHY