Neuroscience and the explanation of psychological phenomena

Explanatory problems in the philosophy of neuroscience are not well captured by the division between the radical and the trivial neuron doctrines. The actual problem is, instead, whether mechanistic biological explanations across different levels of description can be extended to account for psychol...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Behavioral and brain sciences 1999-10, Vol.22 (5), p.847-849
Main Author: Revonsuo, Antti
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brain
Criticism
Gold & Stoljar: A neuron doctrine
Neurology
Open Peer Commentary
Philosophy
Psychology
Science
Theory
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Explanatory problems in the philosophy of neuroscience are not well captured by the division between the radical and the trivial neuron doctrines. The actual problem is, instead, whether mechanistic biological explanations across different levels of description can be extended to account for psychological phenomena. According to cognitive neuroscience, some neural levels of description at least are essential for the explanation of psychological phenomena, whereas, in traditional cognitive science, psychological explanations are completely independent of the neural levels of description. The challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to discover the levels of description appropriate for the neural explanation of psychological phenomena.
ISSN:0140-525X
1469-1825
DOI:10.1017/S0140525X99432194