The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction by Justin Garson

Author:Justin Garson [Garson, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317676683
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-10-17T04:00:00+00:00

5.1 HOW TO REDUCE THEORIES TO ONE ANOTHER

The question of whether consciousness can be explained by the brain is often put in terms of “reduction.” Is consciousness reducible to brain activity? “Reduction,” however, is ambiguous. Sometimes it just means something like explanation: can we explain the distinctive features of consciousness, such as qualia and intentionality, in terms of brain activity? This is the “epistemological” or “explanatory” sense of reduction. Sometimes, “reduction” is meant in a deeper, metaphysical way: is it true that consciousness is nothing but brain activity? That thoughts and feelings are nothing but electrical and chemical reactions amongst neurons? This is reduction in the “ontological” or “metaphysical” sense. The first sense has to do with the order of knowledge, and is mainly about our scientific theories, models, and representations. The second sense has to do with the nature of reality, and is mainly about what really exists, independently of our theories and models.

Not everyone recognizes a strict separation between “epistemological” and “ontological” sides to questions about reduction.4 Epistemology and ontology are not entirely separable. In part, this is because the answers we give to the one sort of question are shaped by our assumptions regarding the other. Yet philosophers do traditionally distinguish between the two sorts of questions. The fact that they are not completely independent of one another doesn’t mean the distinction itself collapses. In this chapter, I’ll stick as closely as possible to the explanatory sense of “reduction.” That’s because this chapter is really about explanation and the explanatory gap.

Keeping the two senses of “reduction” separate for the purpose of the mind-body problem leads to some interesting hybrid possibilities. At least on the surface, consciousness or qualia could be “reducible” to the brain in one sense of the term and not the other. For example, one reasonable viewpoint is that even if there is an explanatory gap, that doesn’t mean there is a metaphysical gap, between consciousness and the brain. That is, even if we don’t quite understand how they fit together, that doesn’t mean they’re really different things. One possibility here is that the concepts that we use to think about qualitative states are so different from the concepts that we use to think about brain states, that this difference generates the illusion that they could exist independently of each other (Loar 1990; Carruthers 2000; Papineau 2002; see Chalmers [2007] and Tye [2009] for criticism of this “phenomenal concept” approach).

The American philosopher of science, Ernest Nagel, is primarily responsible for developing intertheoretic reduction, which he described in his book The Structure of Science, though the philosopher of science J. H. Woodger developed similar ideas independently (Nagel 1961; Woodger 1952).5 (Incidentally, Nagel is one of the few philosophers to have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.) Nagel himself was part of a philosophical movement called “logical empiricism,” and some of the problems people raise against his approach to reduction reflect problems with that movement as a whole. In retrospect, it’s

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