Coordinated pluralism as a means to facilitate integrative taxonomies of cognition

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a growing awareness of conceptual and methodological hurdles within psychology and neuroscience that must be addressed for taxonomic and explanatory progress in understanding psychological functions to be possible. In this paper, I evaluate several recent knowledge-building initiatives aimed at overcoming these obstacles. I argue that while each initiative offers important insights about how to facilitate taxonomic and explanatory progress in psychology and neuroscience, only a “coordinated pluralism” that incorporates positive aspects of each initiative will have the potential for success.

Keywords:

• cognitive ontology
• experimental paradigm
• neuroscience
• progress
• psychology
• pluralism
• taxonomy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank three anonymous referees and Natalia Washington for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The author would also like to thank attendees at the Operations and Cognitive Ontology Workshop held at Washington University in St. Louis, February 1, 2017, including Carl Craver, Uljana Feest, Eric Hochstein, Ron Mallon, Joseph McCaffrey, Anya Plutynski, Caroline Stone and Natalia for helpful feedback. The author would also like to thank Deanna Barch for taking the time to meet with her to talk about CNTRICS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jacqueline Sullivan is Associate Professor of Philosophy, a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and an associate member of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario. Her work in philosophy of neuroscience has appeared in Philosophy of Science, Synthese and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. She is also co-editor of Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds (MIT Press 2014).

Notes

1. At that time, the DSM (DSM-1) contained many psychodynamic terms, including “conversion”, “mental conflict”, “secondary gain” and “neurosis”, which did not “refer to directly observable phenomena” but instead “to theoretically assumed psychodynamic factors” that “ha[d] a distinct meaning and function only in the context of” a corresponding theory (Hempel 1959, 140). The problem was that the clinicians and scientists who used the manual hailed from a diverse array of theoretical backgrounds. Clinicians coming from different theoretical backgrounds either did not use these terms at all or used the same terms in different ways. This prompted miscommunication and correlated with “diagnostic agreement between clinicians (i.e., inter-rater reliability)” being “sometimes little better than chance” (Haslam 2013, 7)

2. Importantly, Hempel claims that not all terms in a given area of science are or can be operationally defined. He says, “It would be unreasonable to demand, however, that all the terms used in a given scientific discipline be given an operational specification of meaning; for then, the process of specifying the meanings of the defining terms, and so forth, would lead to an infinite regress. In any definitional context [quite independently of the issue of operationism], some terms must be antecedently understood; and the objectivity of science demands that the terms which serve as a basis for the introduction of other scientific terms should be among those used with a high degree of uniformity by different investigators in the field (Hempel 144).”

3. Uljana Feest 2010, 2011, 2016 describes the iterative and dynamic nature of concept formation and knowledge production in psychology.

4. Although the CNTRICS initiative (at least initially) aimed to develop treatments for impaired cognitive and emotional processing in schizophrenia (See Carter and Barch 2007, 1134), I am only focusing on work on cognitive constructs in this paper.

5. A series of meetings involving working task forces eventually led to the development of the Cognitive Neuroscience Test Reliability and Clinical Applications for Schizophrenia (CNTRACS) Consortium, which, by 2012 (Gold et al. 2012), had narrowed down the initial list of constructs to 4 constructs and 4 related tasks: (1) goal maintenance/dot probe expectancy task (DPX); (2) relational encoding and retrieval/relational and item specific encoding task (RISE); (3) gain control/contrast-contrast effect task (CCE); and (4) visual integration/jitter orientation visual integration task (JOVI). This is a much more modest list of constructs and paradigms than were originally being considered, which may mean that doing rigorous analysis of constructs and the tools used to measure them may actually serve to significantly narrow the pool of constructs considered to be valid and the pools of tasks thought to measure them. As an aside, there is little of the categories of folk psychology in this list of constructs. What role folk psychology ought to play in the sciences of the mind and brain remains a hot topic of debate (See for example Francken and Slors 2014; Hochstein 2012, 2013; Sullivan 2014a). Russ Poldrack also has a blog post on this issue with some interesting responses. http://www.russpoldrack.org/2016/04/how-folksy-is-psychology-linguistic.html

6. It was, however acknowledged that some paradigms did not allow behavioral assessment and required assessment at other levels of analysis (e.g., fMRI data).

7. In a recent presentation at the 25^th Biennial Philosophy of Science Association Meeting, Noel Martin (Martin 2016) put forward an account of coordinating in the mind-brain sciences in response to my claim that current practices are not coordinated in ways that facilitate explanatory integration. What I mean by “coordinated pluralism” here differs from what he means by “coordinating”.