Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

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size, location, temporal characteristics, and many other physical/neural properties. Clearly, the concept of a CPG is a functional concept. But it is still explanatory: positing such circuits illuminates how certain kinds of behavior and observed neural activity might take place. These abstract structures play an explanatory role independent of information about their realizers. Knowing that an organism’s control systems contain a CPG in a certain location helps to explain certain of its capacities Two examples are control of swimming in the lamprey and the stomatogastric ganglion of the lobster, which regulates digestion. In virtue of producing certain sorts of effects, these functional units can be situated within a larger system of control structures. Understanding how an organism possesses a range of capacities depends on seeing its inner organization as containing such units. The same is true of lateral inhibition, which is an abstract device for producing a range of effects in sensory processing. I suggest that, in the behavioral sciences, it is by recurrently playing this sort of role in abstract control systems that functional categories earn their status as kinds. The interesting functionally defined categories, then, constitute recurrent building blocks of cognitive systems. They explain the possession of various capacities of those systems without reference to specific underlying mechanisms. They may in turn be explained by the presence of further functional units at lower levels, or by physical mechanisms. One major task in understanding cognition is The Functional Unity of Special Science Kinds — Daniel A. Weiskopf finding the right decomposition of a system into abstract control units and constituents. Logic, computation theory, cybernetics and control theory, and neural network theory provide examples of how the theory of such control units might be developed. And insofar as such functional categories can usefully be applied to modeling cognition, they count as kinds. Literature Battelle, B.-A. 2006 “The eyes of Limulus polyphemus (Xiphosura, Chelicerata) and their afferent and efferent projections”, Arthropod Structure and Development 35, 261-274. Bechtel, W., and Mundale, J. 1999 “Multiple realizability revisited: Linking cognitive and neural states”, Philosophy of Science 66, 175-207. Field, G. D., and Chichilnisky, E. J. 2007 “Information processing in the primate retina: Circuitry and coding”, Annual Review of Neuroscience 30, 1-30. Hartline, H. K., and Ratliff, F. 1957 “Inhibitory interaction of receptor units in the eye of Limulus”, Journal of General Physiology 40, 357-376. Shapiro, L. 2000 “Multiple realizations”, Journal of Philosophy 97, 635-654. Shapiro, L. 2004 The Mind Incarnate, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sterling, P. 1998 “Retina”, in: G. Shepherd (ed.), The Synaptic Organization of the Brain (4 th ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 205-254. 389
Transcendental Philosophy and Mind-Body Reductionism Christian Helmut Wenzel, Puli, Taiwan In Wittgenstein on Language and Thought, Thornton gives an account of naturalization that he calls “representationalism”: “Representationalism attempts to explain linguistic content as resulting from mental content and then to give a reductionist account of the latter. Mental content is ‘naturalised’ through the provision of a causal explanation of content” (p. vii). Thus we have a two-step reduction, first from linguistic content to mental content, then from the mental to the physical. Mental content is seen in representations, “internal mental representations that stand in causal relations to things in the world” (viii). Fodor’s “descriptive causal theory” and Millikan’s “teleological, or natural selective” account are given as examples of such representationalism. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, Thornton shows, opposes such reductionist theories already in the first step: Representations and mental content so understood would be too isolated and internal, too detached from the outside world. Linguistic content and meaning cannot be understood this way. Instead, they should be seen as being more “outside” from the start, making sense only within language and its use in society. How would Kant fare in such current discussions? Certainly he has much to say about representations, Vorstellungen, Latin representationes. He also has read Locke and Hume and is aware of their empiricist accounts of impressions and ideas, as well as of Descartes’ res cogitans. Yet Kant does not take the same route they do. He is usually not mentioned in current discussions of naturalization and reductionism of the mental to the physical. Nevertheless, although he does not – returning to Thornton – talk about linguistic content, he has much to say about judgments and representations. Certainly representations must have meaning, and they often arise from perceptions. Objects appear to us, and we don’t make them up. Kant was not an idealist like Berkeley. He even distanced himself from Descartes, whom he also saw as an idealist (A 226/B 274). Unlike them, he never doubted the existence of the outside world. He saw himself as an “empirical realist” instead. So how would Kant react to current physicalist-reductionist accounts of representations and meanings? When looking at his early writings, such as his “General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or An Attempt to Understand the Structure and Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe According to Newton’s Principles”, one might think he has a liking for naturalization. But when thinking of his Critique of Pure Reason, one starts to have doubts. Why is that? Central to Kant’s transcendental philosophy from his Critique of Pure Reason are the categories, imagination, understanding, schemata, and these can easily appear to be mental in some way. Not without reason, Kantian faculty-talk is sometimes seen as psychological. In any case, one might want to call Kant a representationalist of some kind, simply because the notion of Vorstellung, Latin representatio, holds a central place in his theoretical transcendental philosophy. But somehow Kant cannot be a representationalist of the kind Thornton has in mind. He does not understand his theory as giving an account of “mental” content in an 390 individual person’s head, and he certainly does not try to reduce mental representations to causal stories. Such an undertaking would undercut his transcendental project from the start, or, rather, it would not touch it, but miss it altogether. Kant is not interested in an individual person’s head and in how empirical concepts arise and are acquired, as Locke was. To the contrary, he wants to establish a priori concepts that make such experience possible. These concepts, the categories, are not understood as mental in opposition to the physical. They are very special concepts. They make the physical as such possible, and the naturalists do not talk about them at all. In a sense, transcendental philosophy undercuts the mind-body naturalist’s project. Kant does not start with a mind-body dualism, with categories in the head and objects out there to be schematized. He also does not go in for the Cartesian res extensa – res cogitans distinction. For Kant, the categories underlie the world we experience, because objects are nothing but appearances brought under schematized categories. Not only objects, but even time and space are not out there, independently of us. The forms of time and space are subjective and make objectivity possible. If there is a “head” in the sense of transcendental philosophy, then the world has to be in it – at least the a priori aspects of it. Kant distinguishes between an inner and an outer sense, but not between an inner world of representations in the head and an outer world next to it. In particular, it is empirical causality that is seen, within transcendental philosophy, to depend on a priori causality, and therefore it would not make any sense to try to reduce the transcendentally mental to the empirically causal. Empirical concepts and representations might be naturalized, but not a priori ones. Transcendental philosophy and the Copernican revolution go the other way around. They are independent of any philosophical project in which causality is taken for granted, as Fodor, Millikan and others do. It is not that such projects do not make any sense. The point here is that even if they succeed, they will not answer Kant’s question about the possibility of experience and objectivity. Naturalizing projects take objectivity and the physical world for granted. It is as Barry Stroud says, in contrast to Jay Rosenberg’s historicizing, evolutionary and naturalizing accounts (Rosenberg, 616-20) of the Kantian minimalist “conceptual core” (615): “The absence of any interesting necessary conditions of thought and experience must be established, and not simply asserted as likely on general historical or ‘evolutionary’ grounds. Even the most uncompromising ‘evolutionary’ attitude would not preclude us from asking what it is that makes thought or experience possible – how it is possible for thought and experience to have ‘objects’, or be ‘of’ or ‘about’ something. It remains to be seen that that very general question itself must be given an historical or ‘evolutionary’ answer, even if an historical or ‘evolutionary’ answer must be given to the quite different question of who and why in the development of homo sapiens those conditions ever in fact came to be fulfilled.” (Stroud 1977, 81-82)
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31 Alexander Hieke Hannes Leitgeb H
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Reduktion und Elimination in Philos
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Distributors Die Österreichische L
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6 Inhalt / Contents Wittgenstein me
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8 Inhalt / Contents The Evolution o
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Formal Mechanisms for Reduction in
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4. Property language and theoretica
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imperatives, or commands in the for
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Referential Practice and the Lure o
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The Augustinian account confuses mo
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hurried to fix it on the page. The
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The Essence (?) of Color, According
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Literature Austin, James 1980 “Wi
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Wittgenstein’s Externalism - Gett
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Informal Reduction E.P. Brandon, Ca
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An Anti-Reductionist Argument Based
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An Anti-Reductionist Argument Based
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Did I Do It? -Yeah, You Did! Wittge
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Literature Did I Do It? -Yeah, You
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tween the two approaches. The task
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On Two Recent Defenses of The Simpl
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On Two Recent Defenses of The Simpl
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Queen Victoria’s Dying Thoughts T
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Diagonalization. The Liar Paradox,
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Proof: Given a function ƒ from con
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that I am sure that it is true that
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experiencing something as a red pen
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There can be Causal without Ontolog
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There can be Causal without Ontolog
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objects. But they also leave unansw
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The Knower Paradox and the Quantifi
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The Knower Paradox and the Quantifi
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lent. It also implies that an inven
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The Scapegoat Theory of Causality M
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We may have evolved a specialized c
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easoning have their source in the l
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Wittgenstein on Frazer and Explanat
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genstein 1993, p. 143). In order to
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an adequate syntactic analysis of o
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Wittgenstein meets ÖGS: Wovon man
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Wittgenstein meets ÖGS: Wovon man
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3. Der Elementarsatz wird als Relat
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Literatur Glock, Hans Johann 2006
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Explaining the Brain: Ruthless Redu
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Occam’s Razor in the Theory of Th
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Literature Campbell, Donald T. 1987
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Die Nichtreduzierbarkeit der klassi
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Literatur Die Nichtreduzierbarkeit
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Let T I be the minimal theory of tr
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Does Bradley’s Regress Support No
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(3) Mutatis mutandis, realism has t
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Zeitliche Ontologie und zeitliche R
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Betrachtung ontologischer Fragen, M
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The decisive consequences of this a
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Benacerraf and Bad Company (An Atta
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offer a solution to the bad company
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Literature Benacerraf, Paul 1965
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"PA" by using "PA* ", at least at t
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Hard Naturalism and its Puzzles Ren
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The Mind-Body-Problem and Score-Kee
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mental properties, for instance, or
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kommt es zu einem gravierenden Miss
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Reduction Revisited: The Ontologica
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4. Conclusion Reduction Revisited:
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All in all, we have seen that reduc
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Physicalism Without the A Priori Pa
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Literature Cartwright, Nancy 1999:
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Wittgensteins Projektionsmethode al
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Schlussbemerkungen Wittgensteins Pr
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intentional states requires functio
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Relating Theories. Models and Struc
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Literature Relating Theories. Model
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e invoked in response to the questi
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Do Brains Think? Christopher Humphr
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4. Conclusion So do brains think or
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How Metaphors Alter the World-Pictu
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The Modal Supervenience of the Conc
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Literature van der Auwera, Johan an
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3. The Determination of Form by Syn
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Zwischen Humes Gesetz und „Sollen
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Assessing Humean Supervenience Amir
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determination thesis; it fails as a
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Aus der obigen Definition folgt, da
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Ding-Ontology of Aristotle vs. Sach
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Ding-Ontology of Aristotle vs. Sach
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How do Moral Principles Figure in M
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“Downward Causation”: Emergent,
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“Downward Causation”: Emergent,
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A with distinguished subset Z of te
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A Metaphysically Moderate Version o
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Literature Balashov, Yuri 2002 ''Wh
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“In der Frage liegt ein Fehler”
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Problems with Psychophysical Identi
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identity theory, or as a predecesso
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of the world. It only matters that
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Four Anti-reductionist Dogmas in th
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Four Anti-reductionist Dogmas in th
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notion of time and requires that so
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Some Remarks on Wittgenstein and Ty
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Some Remarks on Wittgenstein and Ty
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concrete particulars can be subject
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phenomenal concept of experiencing
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Metaphorische Bedeutung als virtus
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speaker is then attaching a special
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„Vom Weißdorn und vom Propheten
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„Die Einheit hören“ - Einige
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„Die Einheit hören“ - Einige
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S4) the necessity of arithmetic is
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Getting out from Inside: Why the Cl
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Dispensing with Particulars: Unders
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Literature Dispensing with Particul
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Reichenbach’s Concept of Logical
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Defining Ontological Naturalism Mar
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Literature Jackson, Frank 1986. “
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properties are located. This proces
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‘our conceptual scheme’ “is c
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Properties and Reduction between Me
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Does this mean that metaphysics sho
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do not pick out pain in a system by
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The Writing of Nietzsche and Wittge
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his teachings. He coincides with hi
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sense of a proposition without firs
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Naturalistic Ethics: A Logical Posi
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Literature Kant, Immanuel 2006 Crit
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What we now require is a bridge the
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Species, Variability, and Integrati
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could mention the many sorts of iso
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to work this way. Classic examples
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The Key Problems of KC Matteo Pleba
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have embraced the myth of prose: it
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5. Prior’s Problem As Patrick Bla
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Reductionism in Axiology: the Case
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developing of cancer tissue in huma
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(2) One-way Nagelian bridge princip
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Rethinking the Modal Argument again
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Rethinking the Modal Argument again
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that we are to find the features we
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Atypical Rational Agency Paul Raymo
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Literature Anscombe, G. E. M. 1957
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situation bieten sich keine Kriteri
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Two Reductions of ‘rule’ Dana R
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one that could take place, but does
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physics is not able to make, since
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Wittgenstein’s Attitudes Fabien S
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view of logic, in accordance with h
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Warum man auf transzendentalphiloso
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Making the Mind Higher-Level Elizab
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Literature Churchland, P. M. (1995)
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Mental Causation: A Lesson from Act
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Again, this is mistaken. Non-reduct
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auf alle Arten von kontingenten Pro
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Reduction, Sets, and Properties Ben
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Literature Egan, Andy (2004): ‘Se
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there is a tension between evaluati
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The Elimination of Meaning in Compu
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sufficient to explain all of the em
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that 'A' and 'A' could never be tok
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the necktie sense) can differ in wh
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Supervenience and ‘Should’ Arto
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word 'norm' can be thought to expre
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Rule-following as Coordination: A G
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vast majority are bent: gruesome, g
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human life, the violent condition o
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A Division in Mind. The Misconceive
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A Division in Mind. The Misconceive
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could then deduce (1c) and conclude
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Neutral Monism. A Miraculous, Incoh
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Page 352 and 353: that he was working on a translatio
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Page 394 and 395: From Topology to Logic. The Neural
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Page 398 and 399: The Calculus of Inductive Construct
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Page 402 and 403: experience. Of course, a detailed a
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