European Studies in of Science

Volume 2

Series editors Dennis Dieks , Institute for History & Foundations of Science , Utrecht University , The Netherlands Maria Carla Galavotti , Università di Bologna , Italy Wenceslao J. Gonzalez , University of A Coruña , Spain

Editorial Board Daniel Andler, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens, Greece Diderik Batens, Ghent University, Belgium Michael Esfeld, University of Lausanne, Jan Faye, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Olav Gjelsvik, University of Oslo, Norway Stephan Hartmann, University of Munich, Germany Gurol Irzik, Sabancı University, Turkey Ladislav Kvasz, Charles University, Czech Republic Adrian Miroiu, National School of Political Science and Public Administration, Romania Elizabeth Nemeth, University of Vienna, Austria Ilkka Niiniluoto, University of Helsinki, Finland Samir Okasha, University of Bristol, UK Katarzyna Paprzycka, University of Warsaw, Poland Tomasz Placek, Jagiellonian University, Poland Demetris Portides, University of Cyprus, Cyprus Wlodek Rabinowicz, Lund University, Sweden Miklos Redei, School of Economics, UK Friedrich Stadler, University of Vienna, Austria Gereon Wolters, University of Konstanz, Germany This new series results from the synergy of EPSA - European Philosophy of Science Association - and PSE - Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective: ESF Networking Programme (2008–2013). It continues the aims of the Springer series “The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective” and is meant to give a new impetus to European research in the philosophy of science. The main purpose of the series is to provide a publication platform to young researchers working in Europe, who will thus be encouraged to publish in English and make their work internation- ally known and available. In addition, the series will host the EPSA conference proceedings, selected papers coming from workshops, edited volumes on specifi c issues in the philosophy of science, monographs and outstanding Ph.D. disserta- tions. There will be a special emphasis on philosophy of science originating from Europe. In all cases there will be a commitment to high standards of quality. The Editors will be assisted by an Editorial Board of renowned scholars, who will advise on the selection of manuscripts to be considered for publication.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13909 David Ludwig

A Pluralist Theory of the Mind David Ludwig Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam , The Netherlands

European Studies in Philosophy of Science ISBN 978-3-319-22737-5 ISBN 978-3-319-22738-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-22738-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950433

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In this sense, however, every sensible and philosophically honest world view must be pluralistic. For the universe is variegated and manifold, a fabric woven of many qualities no two of which are exactly alike. A formal metaphysical monism, with its principle that all being is in truth one , does not give an adequate account; it must be supplemented with some sort of pluralistic principle. Moritz Schlick – General Theory of Knowledge, 1918/1974, p. 333

Acknowledgements

The issues raised in this book have been with me since my time as an undergraduate student at Free University Berlin. When I decided to study philosophy in 2002, my intellectual landscape was dominated by a handful of critical theorists in the tradi- tion of the Frankfurt School. My fi rst contact with contemporary academic philoso- phy came as a shock that impressed me so deeply that I quickly changed my enrollment from philosophy and ancient history to philosophy and cognitive sci- ence. As far as I remember, this decision was made during Holm Tetens’ lecture on “Computers, Brains, and other Machines” and one of his melancholic pleas for a naturalist theory of the mind. Holm’s uncompromising insistence on intellectual honesty left us students with the pessimistic suggestion that naturalism was a tragic truth, but a truth nonetheless. The anti-naturalists’ obsession with qualia and other supposedly irreducible entities was well motivated but unfortunately not well justifi ed. Challenged by this pessimistic naturalism, I decided that my philosophical inter- ests require more than anecdotal knowledge about the natural sciences. The cogni- tive science program at the University of Potsdam offered a great opportunity to learn about a large range of fascinating disciplines from excellent teachers like Johannes Haack and Reinhold Kliegl. Now focusing on debates about mind and cognition, my new subjects suggested a neat division of labor. As a student of cogni- tive science, I would learn about empirical problems of human memory, perception, problem solving, and so on. As a student of philosophy, I would be concerned with the remaining metaphysical problems such as consciousness, intentionality, self- knowledge, or . However, the problems with this division of labor soon started to appear. While I did my best to follow lectures from neurolinguistics to artifi cial intelligence, the convenient philosophical distinction between “easy” empirical problems and “hard” metaphysical problems made less and less sense. On the one hand, the “easy” empirical problems weren’t so easy after all and the reductive explanations from my Introduction to courses nowhere to be found. On the other hand, there appeared to be a wealth of fascinating empirical research on consciousness,

ix x Acknowledgements intentionality, and other entities that were claimed to fall in the ’ realm of competence. Of course, I was soon introduced to a number of philosophical strat- egies of explaining this discomfort away. Models of reductive explanation in phi- losophy of mind were not supposed to provide a realistic account of explanations in scientifi c practice. Furthermore, the “hard problem of consciousness” did not imply that scientists have nothing to say about consciousness. Instead, one just had to separate the empirically unproblematic issues such as access consciousness or neu- ral correlates from the philosophically troubling issue of phenomenal consciousness. My discomfort about the relation between philosophy of mind and the reality of scientifi c practice might have faded without three lucky coincidences during my time as student in Berlin. First, I started to work as a student assistant for Peter Bieri who had been highly infl uential in establishing of mind in German philosophy but had become disenchanted with the entire discipline. I do not know whether Peter Bieri would agree with the core claims of this book, but our discussions about Wittgenstein, Goodman, and the state of philosophy of mind were the single most important event in the formation of the thoughts of this book. The second lucky coincidence was a seminar on mereology with Olaf Müller at the same time as I was exposed to Peter Bieri’s staunch criticism of the analytic mainstream that he so successfully co-established in Germany. Olaf Müller’s broadly Putnam- inspired criticism of current developments in ontology provided me with a much- needed theoretical framework to formulate my ideas. My term paper on “mereological physicalism” was a fi rst attempt to articulate my discomfort with current philosophy of mind and to sketch a broadly pluralist alternative. The third lucky coincidence was that I started working as a student assistant for Tania Munz at the Max - Planck Institute for the History of Science . I rarely talked with history of science colleagues about philosophy of mind and I rarely talk about history of science thorough this book. Still, this book would not have been possible without a perspective on science that I do not owe to philosophers but to historians. I had learned to approach philosophy of mind by starting with sweeping metaphysi- cal doctrines (mostly physicalism and dualism in their countless varieties) and by looking at the cognitive sciences for support. It took history of science to invert this perspective. Instead of asking how science can validate a presupposed metaphysical picture, I became increasingly convinced that metaphysics needs to adapt to the reality of scientifi c practice. Suddenly, my point of departure was not physicalism or dualism anymore but the overwhelming diversity of ontologies and methods in contemporary science. This book is an attempt to make sense of this diversity. While I do not mean to deny the value of reduction or ontological unifi cation in science, I present a picture that differs quite dramatically from the metaphysical accounts that have dominated philosophy of mind since the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, I would like to think that this book is more than the sum of lucky coincidences during my philosophical education. Still, many issues have been with me for so long that I could easily include half of my academic teachers and fellow students in the acknowledgements. As I would surely forget most of them, I just want to single out one student who has become a wonderful colleague over the Acknowledgements xi years: David Löwenstein has not only always given me valuable feedback but has patiently listened to me rambling about pluralism and philosophy of mind for nearly a decade. The fi rst step towards this book was my Magister thesis Philosophie des Geistes ohne Ontologie that was supervised by Holm Tetens and Georg Bertram at Free University Berlin (2010). The fi rst version of the actual book manuscript was pre- pared as my doctoral thesis at Humboldt University Berlin under supervision of both Olaf Müller and Holm Tetens (2012). Olaf Müller and Holm Tetens have been wonderful teachers who always found the right balance between giving me the nec- essary freedom to develop my own ideas and challenging me with constructive criticism. The fi nal stage of preparing the book manuscript was Columbia University where I was a postdoctoral visiting scholar under supervision of Philip Kitcher from 2012 to 2014. Although the main focus of my work at Columbia was a new project on scientifi c ontologies, Philip’s work on pragmatism and pluralism has been invaluable for clarifying basic assumptions in this book. Furthermore, I was lucky to join a great group of international scholars (especially Marcus Ohlström, Shashikala Srinivasan, and Joseph Li Vecchi) who critically questioned my argu- ments. Finally, Sophia Davis, Marcus Ohlström, Olivier Sartenaer, Sabine Schmidt, and an anonymous reviewer read large parts of the manuscript and challenged me to improve my arguments.

Contents

Part I Pluralism and Scientifi c Practice 1 Beyond Placement Problems ...... 3 1.1 Varieties of Naturalism ...... 5 1.2 Reduction and Reductive Explanation ...... 9 1.3 Epistemological, Metaphysical, and Conceptual Pluralism ...... 12 1.4 The Argument in a Nutshell ...... 14 References ...... 16 2 A Historical Diagnosis ...... 19 2.1 Schlick’s Challenge ...... 21 2.2 The Forgotten Mainstream of Psychophysical Parallelism ...... 22 2.3 The Ontological Priority of the Physical ...... 25 2.4 The Placement Problem in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind .... 27 References ...... 28

Part II In Defense of Conceptual Relativity 3 Conceptual Relativity in Philosophy ...... 33 3.1 The Idea of a Fundamental Ontology ...... 35 3.2 Putnam’s Case for Conceptual Relativity ...... 39 3.3 Understandability and the Epistemic Challenge ...... 41 References ...... 44 4 Conceptual Relativity in Science ...... 47 4.1 Species ...... 48 4.2 Cognition ...... 56 4.3 Intelligence ...... 65 4.4 What about Natural Kinds? ...... 69 4.5 Realism and Existential Relativity ...... 76 4.6 Reconsidering the Dialectical Situation ...... 78 References ...... 80

xiii xiv Contents

5 The Demarcation Problem of Conceptual Relativity ...... 85 5.1 Verbal and Substantive Disputes ...... 86 5.2 Interpretive Charity as an Answer to Demarcation Problem ...... 88 5.3 Turning the Demarcation Problem Upside Down ...... 93 5.4 Joint Carving and Similarity ...... 95 5.5 From Conceptual Relativity to a Pluralist Theory of the Mind? .... 98 References ...... 99

Part III From Conceptual Relativity to Vertical Pluralism 6 The Argument from Horizontal Pluralism ...... 103 6.1 Does Horizontal Pluralism Imply Vertical Pluralism? ...... 106 6.2 Dupré’s Promiscuous Realism ...... 109 6.3 Bridge Principles and Notions of Reduction ...... 112 6.4 Horizontal Pluralism and Multiple Realization ...... 116 6.5 Reductive Explanation without Reduction ...... 121 6.6 Reductive Explanations of Elementary Learning in Aplysia ...... 125 6.7 Limits of Reductivism ...... 128 References ...... 133 7 The Argument from Ontological Non-fundamentalism ...... 137 7.1 Notions of Ontological Priority ...... 140 7.2 Supervenience-Based Formulations of Ontological Priority ...... 142 7.3 Reductivism, Non-reductivism, and Anti-reductivism ...... 148 References ...... 150

Part IV Beyond the Mind-Body Problem 8 Consciousness ...... 155 8.1 Revisiting the Hard Problem of Consciousness ...... 156 8.2 The Common Puzzles ...... 158 8.3 The Uniqueness of Phenomenal Concepts ...... 162 8.4 Phenomenal Concepts and Physicalism ...... 165 References ...... 170 9 Beyond Dualism and Physicalism ...... 173 9.1 But Isn’t This Dualism? ...... 173 9.2 But Isn’t This Physicalism? ...... 175 9.3 The Identity Objection ...... 178 9.4 Limits of Identity ...... 180 References ...... 185 10 Mental Causation ...... 187 References ...... 191 11 Epilogue Metaphysics in a Complex World ...... 193 11.1 Towards an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Mind ...... 193 11.2 Metaphysics and Unifi cation ...... 198 References ...... 201