Feb 20, 2024 08:47 AM
(This post was last modified: Feb 20, 2024 04:49 PM by C C.)
https://iai.tv/articles/we-must-put-an-e...-auid-2747
EXCERPTS: Reductionism is no longer fashionable in philosophy of mind – the days when the idea that mental states are reducible to physical states was a given are over, and non-reductionism is the new orthodoxy. Yet, while many philosophers of mind would consider themselves card carrying non-reductionists, they also tend to think of psychology as a natural science of the mind. As a result, the defence of the autonomy of the mental one finds in most textbooks operates within a naturalistic framework which fails to acknowledge that humanistic explanations differ in kind from scientific ones.
There is however a neglected form of non-reductionism that has its roots in the idealist tradition and is genuinely pluralistic from an explanatory point of view. This form of non-reductionism is motivated by a defence of humanistic understanding and is found in the work of late British idealists, Michael Oakeshott and R.G. Collingwood. They espoused a version of idealism according to which the task of philosophy is not to determine the constitution of reality, whether it is material or immaterial, but to expose the presuppositions on which all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, rests.
[...] Oakeshott’s criticism is not directed at psychology as a genuine natural science but at psychology as an ‘all-purpose’ science. The target is not science, which he recognizes as a legitimate cognitive enterprise, but scientism. The subject matter of psychology as a genuine natural science ‘is a world of quantitative concepts and measurements, not a world of “mental phenomena”. And where psychology is a science, its conclusions will have the same character, significance and validity as the conclusions of any other science.’...
[...] Oakeshott’s distinction between different orders of inquiry and the distinctive goings-on that they investigate gives rise to a defence of the autonomy of the mental that is quite different from the sort of non-reductionism that dominates contemporary philosophy of mind...
[...] A case in point is multiple realization functionalism, which claims that mental states could be realized in different kinds of physical systems. Since the mental state of being in pain, for example, could be realized in both a human and an octopus, who have very different physiologies, it is not possible to reduce mental states to physical states as reductionists hoped to do. This non-reductivist argument is not premised on the view that there is a categorially distinct kind of going-on which cannot be captured by law-like explanations... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Reductionism is no longer fashionable in philosophy of mind – the days when the idea that mental states are reducible to physical states was a given are over, and non-reductionism is the new orthodoxy. Yet, while many philosophers of mind would consider themselves card carrying non-reductionists, they also tend to think of psychology as a natural science of the mind. As a result, the defence of the autonomy of the mental one finds in most textbooks operates within a naturalistic framework which fails to acknowledge that humanistic explanations differ in kind from scientific ones.
There is however a neglected form of non-reductionism that has its roots in the idealist tradition and is genuinely pluralistic from an explanatory point of view. This form of non-reductionism is motivated by a defence of humanistic understanding and is found in the work of late British idealists, Michael Oakeshott and R.G. Collingwood. They espoused a version of idealism according to which the task of philosophy is not to determine the constitution of reality, whether it is material or immaterial, but to expose the presuppositions on which all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, rests.
[...] Oakeshott’s criticism is not directed at psychology as a genuine natural science but at psychology as an ‘all-purpose’ science. The target is not science, which he recognizes as a legitimate cognitive enterprise, but scientism. The subject matter of psychology as a genuine natural science ‘is a world of quantitative concepts and measurements, not a world of “mental phenomena”. And where psychology is a science, its conclusions will have the same character, significance and validity as the conclusions of any other science.’...
[...] Oakeshott’s distinction between different orders of inquiry and the distinctive goings-on that they investigate gives rise to a defence of the autonomy of the mental that is quite different from the sort of non-reductionism that dominates contemporary philosophy of mind...
[...] A case in point is multiple realization functionalism, which claims that mental states could be realized in different kinds of physical systems. Since the mental state of being in pain, for example, could be realized in both a human and an octopus, who have very different physiologies, it is not possible to reduce mental states to physical states as reductionists hoped to do. This non-reductivist argument is not premised on the view that there is a categorially distinct kind of going-on which cannot be captured by law-like explanations... (MORE - missing details)