Nuhu Osman Attah (University of Pittsburgh)
In this presentation I defend the “autonomy thesis” regarding the identification of psychological kinds, that is the claim that what psychological kinds there are cannot be determined solely by neuroscientific criteria, but must depend also on psychological or phenomenological evidence (Aizawa and Gillet, 2010).
I argue that there are only three ways in which psychological kinds could be individuated if we are to rely on neuroscience alone, contra the “autonomy thesis”: (i) psychological kinds could be individuated on the back of broad/large-scale neurobiological bases such as network level connectivity, (ii) they could be individuated based on dissociations in realizing mechanisms, and (iii) psychological kinds could be picked out on the grounds of fine-grained neural details. I argue that these are the only options available to the methodological reductionist (who naysays the “autonomy thesis”) because they are the only options in the empirical space of neuroscientific explanation.
I then argue following this that for the following respective reasons, none of these options can actually individuate psychological kinds in any useful sense: (a) particular cases of neuroscientific explanation (in particular, I have in mind the Grounded Cognition Model of concepts [Kemmerer, 2015, 274; Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2013]) demonstrate that there are kinds employed by neuroscientists whose large-scale neurobiological instantiations differ significantly; (b) a circularity is involved in (ii) in that mechanisms presuppose a teleological individuation which already makes a reference to psychological predicates - that is to say, since mechanisms are always mechanisms "for" some organismal level phenomenon, individuating kinds based on mechanisms already involves a behavioral-level (non-neurobiological) criterion; and (c) besides a problem of too narrowly restricting what would count as kinds (even to the point of contradicting actual neuroscientific practice, as the case-study from (a) will demonstrate), there is also here a problem of vagueness in the individuation of fine-grained neurobiological tokens (Haueis, 2013).
Since none of these three possible ways of picking out psychological kinds using neurobiology alone work, it would seem to be the case that there is some merit to the claims made by the autonomy thesis. I conclude from all of this, as has been previously concluded by philosophers arguing for the autonomy thesis, that while neurobiological criteria are important aids in identifying psychological kinds in some cases, they cannot strictly determine where and whether such kinds exist.
