Being Reduced New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation

by Hohwy, Jakob; Kallestrup, Jesper

• ISBN13: 9780199211531
• ISBN10: 0199211531
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

There are few more unsettling philosophical questions than this: What happens in attempts to reduce some properties to some other more fundamental properties? Reflection on this question inevitably touches on very deep issues about ourselves, our own interactions with the world and each other, and our very understanding of what there is and what goes on around us. If we cannot command a clear view of these deep issues, then very many other debates in contemporary philosophy seem to lose traction - think of causation, laws of nature, explanation, consciousness, personal identity, intentionality, normativity, freedom, responsibility, justice, and so on. Reduction can easily seem to unravel our world. Here, an eminent group of philosophers helps us answer this question. Their novel contributions comfortably span a number of current debates in philosophy and cognitive science: what is the nature of reduction, of reductive explanation, of mental causation? The contributions range from approaches in theoretical metaphysics, over philosophy of the special sciences and physics, to interdisciplinary studies in psychiatry and neurobiology. The authors connect strands in contemporary philosophy that are often treated separately and in combination the chapters allow the reader to see how issues of reduction, explanation and causation mutually constrain each other. The anthology therefore moves the debate further both at the level of contributions to specific debates and at the level of integrating insights from a number of debates.

Author Biography

Jakob Hohwy obtained his PhD from the Australian National University. He is a lecturer in philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne. Hohwy works on issues of reduction and explanation in science, and engages in interdisciplinary research with neuroscientists and psychiatrists.
Jesper Kallestrup obtained his PhD from the University of St. Andrews. He is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and an associate fellow at Arche, the University of St. Andrews. Kallestrup works on issues of reduction, mental causation and the conceivability arguments in the philosophy of mind.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Reduction and Embodied Cognition: Perspectives from Medicine and Psychiatry	p. 20
Real Reduction in Real Neuroscience: Metascience, Not Philosophy of Science (and Certainly Not Metaphysics!)	p. 34
Reduction in Real Life	p. 52
Group Agency and Supervenience	p. 75
Reduction and Reductive Explanation: Is One Possible Without the Other?	p. 93
CP Laws, Reduction, and Explanatory Pluralism	p. 115
Must a Physicalist be a Microphysicalist?	p. 126
Why There Is Anything Except Physics	p. 149
Multiple Realization: Keeping It Real	p. 164
Causation and Determinable Properties: On the Efficacy of Colour, Shape, and Size	p. 176
The Exclusion Problem, the Determination Relation, and Contrastive Causation	p. 196
Mental Causation and Neural Mechanisms	p. 218
Distinctions in Distinction	p. 263
Exclusion Again	p. 280
Index	p. 307
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