Kinesis 6 (11):1-16 (
2014)
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Abstract
John Bickle recently proposed a metascientific reading of certain neuroscientific
practices related to phenomena traditionally studied by psychology. According to this view, the
dominant explanatory proceeding in neuroscience is to apply empirical reductions to explain
psychological phenomena in cellular and molecular terms, relegating the role of psychology to a
mere heuristic, without explanatory power. Thus, according to the strength of the conclusions
reached by this method, it puts in check the value of psychological functional explanations. In
this work, we seek to reformulate some of these challenging proposals in philosophy of
neuroscience. To this end, the main weaknesses of Bickle's proposal will be shown. Also, here
will put into perspective some (reductionist, eliminativists?) features of ruthless reductionism,
showing that this model maybe represent only a reading of the pragmatic use of certain methods
in neuroscience, rather than a statement of principles generalizable to all cognitive science.