In my PhD thesis I am criticizing the models of reduction and causation in current philosophy of mind, based on recent developments in philosophy of science. The project is supervised by prof. Achim Stephan and prof. Robert C. Richardson, and has been funded by Helsingin Sanomain 100-vuotissäätiö, DAAD, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. I am a member of the research group Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.

One of the most central problems of philosophy is the nature of consciousness and its relation to the body, particularly the brain.  Can consciousness and the mind be reduced to the activity of the brain or to the level of neurons? Can psychological explanations be reduced to neuroscientific explanations? For the last decades, philosophy of mind has been dominated by nonreductive physicalism, which gives a negative answer to these questions: it states that everything, including mind and consciousness, is in the end physical, but mental properties do not reduce to neurobiological properties.

However, both supporters and opponents of nonreductive physicalism have made certain problematic assumptions regarding reduction and causation. The model of reduction in philosophy of mind has been either Nagel’s classic model, which is now considered deficient and unrealistic, or the functional model of reduction (e.g., Kim, Levine), which is based on purely philosophical analysis instead of actual science. Causation has usually been left undefined, while making implicit assumptions about its nature, for example that it has to be “productive” in the sense that the cause produces or brings about the effect.

The aim of my project is to critically examine the aforementioned assumptions regarding reduction and causation, based on recent advances in philosophy of science. I will show that both models of reduction in philosophy of mind are fundamentally problematic, and that a scientifically relevant notion of causation is completely different from that of philosophy of mind.

The developments of philosophy science that I will focus on are the models of mechanistic explanation (Bechtel, Craver, Richardson) and Woodward’s interventionist account of causation. I will show that these models support one another and are in accordance with scientific practice. I will also defend explanatory pluralism, according to which explanations of different levels “co-evolve” and do not replace one another, and higher level (e.g., psychological) explanations are needed even when lower level (e.g., neurobiological) explanations are complete. I will support my claims by going through scientific case studies and examples.

The fundamental aim of my project is to revise philosophy of mind, so that it would be closer to scientific practice and would take the results of philosophy of science better into account. Updating the models of reduction and causation would be a big step to this direction, after which philosophy of mind would stand on more solid ground and be better able to support scientific projects that aim at explaining mind and consciousness.