Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:46:22.788Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Multiple Realizability Revisited: Linking Cognitive and Neural States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

William Bechtel  and
Jennifer Mundale
William Bechtel
Affiliation:
Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program Department of Philosophy, Washington University
Jennifer Mundale
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The contention that psychological states are multiply realizable in different substrates has been used to support the contention that neuroscience is not likely to be very useful in guiding an understanding how cognition works. But in the context of scientific research, how seriously should we really take this threat of multiple realizability? By examining how brain areas are identified in neuroscience (where the approach is comparative and employs functional criteria), we show that the skepticism about neuroscience's role in understanding cognition is misguided and that the apparent success of multiple realizability is based on methodological error. With respect to the former point, we develop and analyze a representative case in which the organization of the brain provides crucial information about the organization of the cognitive system. Then we show that the initial plausibility of claims to multiple realizability rest on (a) mismatching a broad-grained criterion (to show sameness of psychological states) with a finegrained criterion (to differentiate brain states), and (b) a failure to attend to the purposes for which taxonomies of brain and psychological states are developed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 175 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to William Bechtel, Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, Department of Philosophy, Campus Box 1073, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.

‡

Versions of this paper were presented at the Australian Cognitive Science Society Conference, the Conference on Body, Mind, and Brain at the University of Oregon, and at the National Neurobiology Laboratory, National University of Mexico, Querataro, Mexico. We are appreciative for the helpful comments and suggestions made by these audiences. We also received very helpful comments and suggestions from two referees for this journal, Patricia Churchland and Owen Flanagan, for which we are most appreciative.

References

Ballard, Dana H. (1991), “Animate Vision”, Artificial Intelligence 48: 57–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bechtel, William (in press), “From Imaging to Believing: Epistemic Issues in Generating Biological Data”, in Maienschien, J. and Creath, R. (eds.), Epistemology and Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Broca, Paul (1861), “Remarque sur le Siêge de la Faculté Suivies d'une Observation d' Aphémie”, Bulletins de la Société Anatomique de Paris 6: 343–357.Google Scholar
Brodmann, Korbinian (1909/1994), Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Grosshirnrinde. Leipzig: J. A. Barth. (English Translation by L. J. Garey (1994), Brodmann's ‘Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex’. London: Smith-Gordon.)Google Scholar
Churchland, Patricia S., Ramachandran, Vilayanur S., and Sejnowski, Terrence (1994), “A Critique of Pure Vision”, in Koch, C. and Davis, J. L. (eds.), Large-scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Churchland, Patricia S. and Sejnowski, Terrence (1989), “Neural Representation and Neural Computation”, in Nadel, L., Cooper, L., Culicover, P., and Harnish, R. M. (eds.), Neural Connections, Mental Computations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 15–48.Google Scholar
Cowey, Alan (1964), “Projection of the Retina on the Striate and Prestiate Cortex of the Squirrel Monkey Saimiri Sciureus”, Journal of Neurophysiology 27: 366–393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cragg, B. G. (1969), “The Topography of the Afferent Projections in the Circumstriate Visual Cortex of the Monkey Studied by the Nauta Method”, Vision Research 9: 733–747.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Deacon, Terrence W. (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Felleman, Daniel J. and van Essen, David C. (1991), “A Distributed Hierarchical Processing in the Primate Cerebral Cortex”, Cerebral Cortex 1: 1–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferrier, David (1886), The Functions of the Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Finger, Stanley (1994), The Origins of Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fodor, Jerry A. (1987), Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, Jerry A. and Pylyshyn, Zenon W. (1981), “How Direct is Visual Perception? Some Reflections on Gibson's ‘Ecological Approach’ “, Cognition 9: 136–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gennari, Francesco (1782), De Peculiari Structura Cerebri Nonnullisque Eius Morbis. Parma: Ex. Regio Typogratheo.Google Scholar
Gross, Charles G. (1998), Brain, Vision, and Memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Sandy, Chen, Jing, Myerson, Joel, and Simon, Adam (1996), Behavioral Evidence for Brain-based Ability Factors in Visuospatial Information Processing. Paper presented at the Psychonomics Society, November.Google Scholar
Hale, Sandy and Jansen, Jennifer (1994), “Global Processing-Time Coefficients Characterize Individual and Group Differences in Cognitive Speed”, Psychological Science 5: 384–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haxby, James V., Grady, Cheryl L., Horwitz, Barry, Ungerleider, Leslie G., Mishkin, Mortimer, Carson, Richard E., Herscovitch, Peter, Schapiro, Mark B., and Rapoport, Stanley I. (1991), “Dissociation of Object and Spatial Visual Processing Pathways in Human Extrastriate Cortex”, National Academy of Sciences, USA 88: 1621–1625.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henschen, Salomon Eberhard (1893), “On the Visual Path and Centre”, Brain 16: 170–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henschen, Salomon Eberhard (1903), “La projection de la rétine sur la corticalité calcarine”, La Semaine Médicale 23: 125–127.Google Scholar
Hubel, David H. and Wiesel, Torsten N. (1962), “Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction and Functional Architecture in the Cat's Visual Cortex”, Journal of Physiology (London) 160: 106–154.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hubel, David H. and Wiesel, Torsten N. (1965), “Receptive Fields and Functional Architecture in Two Non-striate Visual Areas (18 and 19) of the Cat”, Journal of Neurophysiology 28: 229–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hubel, David H. and Wiesel, Torsten N. (1968), “Receptive Fields and Functional Architecture of Monkey Striate Cortex”, Journal of Physiology (London) 195: 215–243.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ingle, David J. (1973), “Two Visual Systems in the Frog”, Science 181: 1053–1055.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ingle, David J. (1982), “Organization of Visuomotor Behaviors in Vertebrates”, in Ingle, D. J., Goodale, M. A., and Mansfield, R. J. W. (eds.), Analysis of Visual Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 67–109.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Robert A., Jordan, Michael I., and Barto, Andrew G. (1991), “Task Decomposition through Competition in a Modular Connectionist Architecture: The What and Where Vision Tasks”, Cognitive Science 15: 219–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lashley, Karl S. and Clark, George, (1946), “The Cytoarchitecture of the Cerebral Cortex of Ateles: A Critical Examination of Architectonic Studies”, Journal of Comparative Neurology 85: 223–305.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Livingstone, Margaret and Hubel, David, (1988), “Segregation of Form, Color, Movement, and Depth: Anatomy, Physiology, and Perception”, Science 240: 740–749.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marr, David (1982), Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.Google Scholar
Merigan, William H. and Maunsell, John H. R. (1993), “How Parallel are the Primate Visual Pathways?”, Annual Review of Neuroscience 16: 369–402.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Milner, A. David and Goodale, Melvyn G. (1995), The Visual Brain in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mishkin, Mortimer, Ungerleider, Leslie G., and Macko, Kathleen. A., (1983), “Object Vision and Spatial Vision: Two Cortical Pathways”, Trends in Neurosciences 6: 414–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petersen, Stephen E., Fox, Peter T., Posner, Michael I., Mintum, Mark, and Raichle, Marcus E., (1989), “Positron Emission Tomographic Studies of the Processing of Single Words”, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 1: 153–170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, Hilary (1967), “Psychological Predicates”, in Capitan, W. H. and Merrill, D. D. (eds.), Art, Mind, and Religion. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 37–48.Google Scholar
Pohl, W. (1973), “Dissociation of Spatial Discrimination Deficits Following Frontal and Parietal lesions in Monkeys”, Journal of Comparative Physiological Psychology 82: 227–239.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Richardson, Robert C. (1979), “Functionalism and Reductionism”, Philosophy of Science 46: 533–558.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rueckl, J. G., Cave, K. R., and Kosslyn, Stephen M. (1989), “Why are ‘What’ and ‘Where’ Processed by Separate Cortical Visual Systems? A Computational Investigation”, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 1: 171–186.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schneider, Gerald E. (1969), “Two Visual Systems: Brain Mechanisms for Localization and Discrimination are Dissociated by Tectal and Cortical Lesions”, Science 163: 895–902.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Talairach, Jean and Tournoux, Pierre (1988), Co-planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain. New York: Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc.Google Scholar
Trevarthen, Colwyn B. (1968), “Two Mechanisms of Vision in Primates”, Psychologische Forschung 31: 299–337.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ungerleider, Leslie G. and Mishkin, Mortimer (1982), “Two Cortical Visual Systems”, in Ingle, D. J., Goodale, M. A., and Mansfield, R. J. W. (eds.), Analysis of Visual Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 549–586.Google Scholar
van Essen, David C., Anderson, Charles H., and Felleman, Daniel J. (1992), “Information Processing in the Primate Visual System: an Integrated Systems Perspective”, Science 255: 419–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Essen, David C., Drury, Heather A., Joshi, Sarang, and Miller, Michael I. (1998), “Functional and Structural Mapping of Human Cerebral Cortex: Solutions Are in the Surfaces”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 95: 788–795.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
van Essen, David C. and Gallant, Jack L. (1994), “Neural Mechanisms of Form and Motion Processing in the Primate Visual System”, Neuron 13: 1–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
von Bonin, Gerhardt and Bailey, Percival (1951), The Isocortex of Man. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Wong-Riley, Margaret T. T. (1979), “Changes in the Visual System of Monocularly Sutured or Enucleated Cats Demonstrable with Cytochrome Oxidase Histochemistry”, Brain Research 171: 11–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zeki, Semir M. (1969), “Representation of Central Visual Fields in Prestriate Cortex of Monkey”, Brain Research 14: 271–291.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zeki, Semir M. (1974), “Functional Organization of a Visual Area in the Posterior Bank of the Superior Temporal Sulcus of the Rhesus Monkey”, Journal of Physiology 236: 549–573.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zeki, Semir M. (1977), “Colour Coding in the Superior Temporal Sulcus of the Rhesus Monkey Visual Cortex”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B197: 195–223.Google Scholar
Zeki, Semir M. (1993), A Vision of the Brain. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific.Google Scholar
Zeki, Semir M., Watson, J. D. G., Lueck, C. J., Friston, Karl J., Kennard, C., Frackowiak, Richard S. J. (1991), “A Direct Demonstration of Functional Specialization in Human Visual Cortex”, Journal of Neuroscience 11: 641–649.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed