Defending or attacking either functionalism or computationalism requires clarity on what they amount to and what evidence counts for or against them. My goal here is not to evaluate their plausibility. My goal is to formulate them and their relationship clearly enough that we can determine which type of evidence is relevant to them. I aim to dispel some sources of confusion that surround functionalism and computationalism, recruit recent philosophical work on mechanisms and computation to shed light on them, and (...) clarify how functionalism and computationalism may or may not legitimately come together. (shrink)

Many empirically minded philosophers have used neuroscientific data to argue against the multiple realization of cognitive functions in existing biological organisms. I argue that neuroscientists themselves have proposed a biologically based concept of multiple realization as an alternative to interpreting empirical findings in terms of one‐to‐one structure‐function mappings. I introduce this concept and its associated research framework and also how some of the main neuroscience‐based arguments against multiple realization go wrong. *Received October 2009; revised December 2009. †To contact the author, (...) please write to: Department of Philosophy, 260 English‐Philosophy Building, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242; e‐mail: carrie‐figdor@uiowa.edu. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, computational explanation is proprietary
to psychology—it does not belong in neuroscience. But neuroscientists routinely offer computational explanations of cognitive phenomena. In fact, computational explanation was initially imported from computability theory into the science of mind by neuroscientists, who justified this move on neurophysiological grounds. Establishing the legitimacy and importance of computational explanation in neuroscience is one thing; shedding light on it is another. I raise some philosophical questions pertaining to computational explanation and outline some promising answers that (...) are being developed by a number of authors. (shrink)

The view that special science properties are multiply realizable has been attacked in recent years by Shapiro, Bechtel and Mundale, Polger, and others. Focusing on psychological and neuroscientific properties, I argue that these attacks are unsuccessful. By drawing on interspecies physiological comparisons I show that diverse physical mechanisms can converge on common functional properties at multiple levels. This is illustrated with examples from the psychophysics and neuroscience of early vision. This convergence is compatible with the existence of general constraints on (...) the evolution of cognitive systems, and does not involve any ad hoc typing of coarse-grained higher level properties. The mechanisms that realize these common higher level properties are really distinct by the criteria laid down by critics of multiple readability. Finally, I present an account of how such functional properties might constitute special science kinds by playing a central explanatory role in a range of cognitive models. Behavioral science kinds in particular are the functionally defined constituents picked out by our most successful models of the multilevel systems and mechanisms that explain cognitive capacities. (shrink)

There have been recent disagreements in the philosophy of neuroscience regarding which sorts of scientific models provide mechanistic explanations, and which do not. These disagreements often hinge on two commonly adopted, but conflicting, ways of understanding mechanistic explanations: what I call the “representation-as” account, and the “representation-of” account. In this paper, I argue that neither account does justice to neuroscientific practice. In their place, I offer a new alternative that can defuse some of these disagreements. I argue that individual models (...) do not provide mechanistic explanations by themselves. Instead, individual models are always used to complement a huge body of background information and pre-existing models about the target system. With this in mind, I argue that mechanistic explanations are distributed across sets of different, and sometimes contradictory, scientific models. Each of these models contributes limited, but essential, information to the same mechanistic explanation, but none can be considered a mechanistic explanation in isolation of the others. (shrink)

This article examines the multiple realizability thesis within a causal framework. The beginnings of this framework are found in Elliott Sober’s “Multiple Realizability Argument against Reduction,”...

One trend in recent work on topic of the multiple realization of psychological properties has been an emphasis on greater sensitivity to actual science and greater clarity regarding the metaphysics of realization and multiple realization. One contribution to this trend is Bechtel and Mundale’s examination of the implications of brain mapping for multiple realization. Where Bechtel and Mundale argue that studies of brain mapping undermine claims about the multiple realization, this paper challenges that argument.

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science regarding how best to interpret the relationship between neuroscience and psychology. It has traditionally been argued that either the two domains will evolve and change over time until they converge on a single unified account of human behaviour, or else that they will continue to work in isolation given that they identify properties and states that exist autonomously from one another (due to the multiple-realizability of psychological (...) states). In this paper, I argue that progress in psychology and neuroscience is contingent on the fact that both of these positions are false. Contra the convergence position, I argue that the theories of psychology and the theories of neuroscience are scientifically valuable as representational tools precisely because they cannot be integrated into a single account. However, contra the autonomy position, I propose that the theories of psychology and neuroscience are deeply dependent on one another for further refinement and improvement. In this respect, there is an irreconcilable codependence between psychology and neuroscience that is necessary for both domains to improve and progress. The two domains are forever linked while simultaneously being unable to integrate. (shrink)

Critics of multiple realizability have recently argued that we should concentrate solely on actual here-and-now realizations that are found in nature. The possibility of alternative, but unactualized, realizations is regarded as uninteresting because it is taken to be a question of pure logic or an unverifiable scenario of science fiction. However, in the biological context only a contingent set of realizations is actualized. Drawing on recent work on the theory of neutral biological spaces, the paper shows that we can have (...) ways of assessing the modal dimension of multiple realizability that do not have to rely on mere conceivability. (shrink)

Recently, several critics of the multiple realizability thesis have argued that philosophers have tended to accept the thesis on too weak grounds. On the one hand, the analytic challenge has problematized how philosophers have treated the multiple realization relation itself, claiming that assessment of the sameness of function and the relevant difference of realizers has been uncritical. On the other hand, it is argued that the purported evidence of the thesis is often left empirically unverified. This paper provides a novel (...) strategy to answer these worries by introducing a role for multiple realizability in the context of biological engineering. In the field of synthetic biology, bioengineers redesign the evolutionary realizations of biological functions, even constructing artificial chemical surrogates in the laboratory. I show how in the rational design approach to biological engineering, multiple realizability can function as a design heuristic in which the sameness of function and difference of realizers can be controlled. Although practically motivated, this engineering approach has also a theoretical, exploratory component that can be used to study the empirical limitations of multiple realizability. Successful realization of the engineering designs would amount to a concrete demonstration of multiple realizability, taking evidence for MRT beyond what is readily found in nature. (shrink)

Multiple realizability (MR) is traditionally conceived of as the feature of computational systems, and has been used to argue for irreducibility of higher-level theories. I will show that there are several ways a computational system may be seen to display MR. These ways correspond to (at least) five ways one can conceive of the function of the physical computational system. However, they do not match common intuitions about MR. I show that MR is deeply interest-related, and for this reason, difficult (...) to pin down exactly. I claim that MR is of little importance for defending computationalism, and argue that it should rather appeal to organizational invariance or substrate neutrality of computation, which are much more intuitive but cannot support strong antireductionist arguments. (shrink)

Though multiple realization has been an important concept in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology for more than fifty years, it has not been until quite recently that anyone proposed an actual theory of what multiple realization is. This paper argues that the most dominant current theories of multiple realization are unacceptable. It does so by mainly arguing for a particular methodology for theorizing about multiple realization. Rather than being mostly constrained by intuitions, as theorizing about folk notions (...) usually is, theorizing about multiple realization is, it argues, constrained by the theoretical context in which the concept was born. By the lights of this method for constructing theories of multiple realization, these current theories are unacceptable. (shrink)