Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave

One of the central problems in the philosophy of psychology is an updated version of the mind-body problem: how levels of theories in the behavioural and brain sciences relate to one another. Many contemporary philosophers of mind believe that cognitive-psychological theories are not reducible to neurological theories. However, this antireductionism has not spawned a revival of dualism. Instead, most nonreductive physicalists prefer the idea of a one-way dependence of the mental on the physical. In this work, John Bickle presents a new type of reductionism, one that is arguably stronger than one-way dependency yet sidesteps the arguments that call into question classical reductionism. Although he makes some concessions to classical antireductionism, he argues for a relationship between psychology and neurobiology that shares some of the key aims, features, and consequences of classical reductionism.