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Abstract
I will begin by proposing a taxonomy of taxonomic positions regarding the mind–brain: localism, globalism, revisionism, and contextualism, and will go on to focus on the last position. Although some versions of contextualism have been defended by various researchers, they largely limit themselves to a version of neural contextualism: different brain regions perform different functions in different neural contexts. I will defend what I call “environmental-etiological contextualism,” according to which the psychological functions carried out by various neural regions can only be identified and individuated against an environmental context or with reference to a causal history. While this idea may seem innocuous enough, it has important implications for a structure-to-function mapping in the mind and brain sciences. It entails that the same neural structures can subserve different psychological functions in different contexts, leading to crosscutting psycho-neural mappings. I will try to illustrate how this can occur with reference to recent research on episodic memory.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to three anonymous referees whose constructive criticisms led to several improvements to this paper. I am also indebted to audiences at the conference on Rethinking the Taxonomy of Psychology, Western University, and the Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago, whose feedback on earlier versions of this paper was very helpful in revising it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He specializes in general issues in the philosophy of science (especially, natural kinds and reductionism) and philosophy of cognitive science (especially, innateness, concepts, and domain specificity). His book, Natural Categories and Human Kinds, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, and he has recently been working on topics in the philosophy of social science (especially, social ontology).
Notes
1. There are a number of distinct conceptions of reductionism, but I think that what I say here applies to any conception that understands reduction as a type–type relation.
2. Another version of globalism might invoke the theory of “neuronal packets” (Luczak, McNaughton, and Harris Citation2015), according to which the temporally organized coordinated activity of neuronal populations constitute the basic building blocks of cortical coding.
3. I understand eliminativism in a minimal sense to comprise any position that hypothesizes the elimination of all mental or psychological categories in favor of neural, physiological, or biological ones.
4. Lindquist et al. (Citation2012) call a closely related position “constructionism,” and this position also seems close to what McIntosh (Citation2004) terms the “neural context hypothesis.”
5. For other analogies in this vein, see Klein (Citation2012, 955) on the changing functions of pistons in diesel truck engines, and Lindquist et al. (Citation2012, 126) on the variable contributions of the same ingredient in different recipes.
6. An early and illuminating account of the difference between structure and function in this context is given by Fodor (Citation1968, 113):
If I speak of a device as a “camshaft,” I am implicitly identifying it by reference to its physical structure, and so I am committed to the view that it exhibits a characteristic and specifiable decomposition into physical parts. But if I speak of the device as a “valve lifter,” I am identifying it by reference to its function and I therefore undertake no such commitment.
7. I think this close relation obtains given the two most widely cited definitions of mechanisms, which regard them either as “entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions” (Machamer, Darden, and Craver Citation2000, 3), or as “an organized set of parts that perform different operations which are orchestrated so as to realize in the appropriate context the phenomenon in question” (Bechtel Citation2009, 544).
8. One could also come up with a kind of hybrid account; for example, Griffiths (Citation1993, 409) argues that the proper functions of a biological trait are “the functions it is assigned in a Cummins-style functional explanation of the fitness of ancestors.”
9. Wings are a good example of convergent evolution, since they arose independently in four different lineages in the history of life (mammals, birds, pterosaurs, and insects). But despite the fact that these analog structures evolved independently, they exhibit many similarities.
As far as we can tell, and despite their radically different starting points, the discovery of flapping flight by the ancestors of bats, pterosaurs, and insects probably played out in much the same way each time, with a controlled descent phase and a progressively refined gliding stage preceding the thrust-generating breakthrough, all ultimately fuelled by gravitational potential energy. (Wilkinson Citation2016, 70)
10. These homologous organs can be considered to correspond to the same character but to different character states (Brigandt Citation2007; Ereshefsky Citation2012).
11. See also Price and Friston (Citation2005, 268) on narrow and wide construals of function. This discussion of function individuation brings up questions of what justifies the adoption of a particular system of taxonomic categories, and when such systems correspond to genuine natural kinds. Here, I am basing myself on an account I have given elsewhere (Khalidi Citation2013).
12. Michaelian altered his position from his (Citation2011) to his (Citation2016).
13. One systematic way in which some episodic memories are more complete than the corresponding original representations occurs in “boundary extension,” wherein subjects report seeing more of a visual scene than they actually saw (Michaelian Citation2011).
14. Again, truth and accuracy are not the main considerations, since misremembering can produce more accurate results in some circumstances (e.g. as in some instances of “boundary extension,” mentioned previously).
15. See Robins (Citation2016b) for a more perspicuous and comprehensive description of this technique, including many further details. She argues that this experimental paradigm, which relies on the identification of a memory trace or engram, is incompatible with radical versions of constructivism.
16. Interestingly, Ereshefsky (Citation2007) argues that treating psychological traits as homologues is a more promising theoretical approach than functionalist accounts or adaptationist accounts (which may track different etiologies).