Bridging Token Identity Theory and Supervenience Theory Through Psychological Construction

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Acknowledgments

Preparation of this article was supported by the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award (DP1OD003312), a grant from the National Institute of Aging (AG030311), and a contract with the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (contract W91WAW-08-C-0018). The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article are solely those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army or DOD position, policy, or decision. Thanks to the members of my Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory for stimulating discussions on the link between philosophy of mind:brain correspondence and psychological construction.

Notes

¹In the emotion example, some older emotion models (e.g., Dewey, 1895) and some newer ones (e.g., LeDoux, 1996) ontologically reduce emotions to physical states and set aside as ontologically separate the experience of emotion as the conscious feeling of this physical state (in these models, emotion experience would be called a “nomological dangler,” a mental phenomenon that does not function as a cause for any observable behavior; but see Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010).

²Frankly, from the standpoint of identity theory, it is not clear what the “surplus meaning” would actually refer to. What is the nature of the nonobserved events or processes that are causing both the neural and the psychological measurements?

³Taking inspiration from connectionist and network approaches to the brain (e.g., Fuster, 2006; Mesulam, 1998; O’Reilly & Munakata, 2000; Poldrack, Halchenko, & Hanson, 2009; Raichle & Snyder, 2007; Seeley et al., 2007; Smith et al. 2009), we hypothesized that basic psychological ingredients correspond to distributed functional network of brain regions. Like ingredients in a recipe, the weighting and contribution of each network is predicted to vary across instances of each psychological category, or even across instances within the same category. One possibility is that these brain networks have intrinsic connectivity (i.e., show correlated activity during mental activity that is not triggered by an external stimulus). Another possibility is that these networks have dynamic functional connectivity (i.e., producing neural assemblies that routinely emerge in response to an external stimulus). The central idea, however, is psychology's job is to identify and understand these basic psychological functions, whereas neuroscientific investigations can reveal the underlying brain basis of these psychological ingredients.

⁴Complex psychological categories like emotion, cognition, perception, intelligence, and so on, are not real in an objective sort of way—they derive their reality from the intentionality that is shared by a group of people (i.e., they are folk categories that are ontologically subjective; for a discussion, see Barrett, 2009a). Therefore might retain their scientific use as descriptions of mental states that require explanation, or in sociology and other social sciences that occupy a different positions in the ontological hierarchy of sciences, but they do not themselves correspond to mental mechanisms.

⁵Intrinsic connectivity networks are identified by examining correlations in low-frequency signals in fMRI data recorded when there is no external stimulus or task (hence this misnomer “resting state” or “default” activity; Beckmann, DeLuca, Devlin, & Smith, 2005; Biswal, Yetkin, Haughton, & Hyde, 1995; Buckner & Vincent, 2007; Greicius, Krasnow, Reiss, & Menon, 2003; Fox et al., 2005). The temporal dynamics of these low-frequency signals reveals networks of regions that increase and decrease in their activity together in a correlated fashion.