Gold & Stoljar pose a dilemma for linguistics should neurobiology win out as the science of mind. The dilemma can be avoided by reestablishing linguistics as an autonomous discipline, rather than a branch of the science of mind. Independent considerations for doing this are presented.

Gold & Stoljar's argument rejecting the “explanatory sufficiency” of the radical neuron doctrine depends on distinguishing it from the trivial neuron doctrine. This distinction depends on the thesis of “supervenience,” which depends on Hume's regularity theory of causation. In contrast, the radical neuron doctrine depends on a physical theory of causation, which denies the supervenience thesis. Insofar as the target article argues by drawing implications from the premise of Humean causation, whereas the radical doctrine depends on the competing premise of physical causation, the resulting critique of the neuron doctrine amounts largely to begging the question of causation.

Gold & Stoljar's target article is important because it shows the limitations of neurobiological theories of the mind more powerfully than previous philosophical criticisms, especially those that focus on the subjective nature of experience and those that use considerations from philosophy of language to argue for the holism of the mental. They use less controversial assumptions and clearer arguments, the conclusions of which are applicable to the whole of neuroscience. Their conclusions can be applied to psychiatry to argue that, contrary to many researchers' assumptions, the approaches to both understanding and treating mental disorders must be interdisciplinary.

This commentary is intended to illuminate Gold's & Stoljar's main contentions by exploiting a favorite comparison, namely, that between biology and electronics. Roughly, and leaving out Darwinian theory and the like, biology is physics and chemistry plus natural history just as electronics is physics plus wiring diagrams. Natural history (even that discovered by sophisticated apparatus such as electron microscopes) contains generalizations, not laws. Psychology and cognitive science typically give more abstract explanations, as do “block diagrams” in electronics, and are less dispensable.

Explanatory problems in the philosophy of neuroscience are not well captured by the division between the radical and the trivial neuron doctrines. The actual problem is, instead, whether mechanistic biological explanations across different levels of description can be extended to account for psychological phenomena. According to cognitive neuroscience, some neural levels of description at least are essential for the explanation of psychological phenomena, whereas, in traditional cognitive science, psychological explanations are completely independent of the neural levels of description. The challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to discover the levels of description appropriate for the neural explanation of psychological phenomena.

Two notions of autonomy are distinguished. The respective denials that psychology is autonomous from neurobiology are neuron doctrines, moderate and radical. According to the moderate neuron doctrine, interdisciplinary interaction need not aim at reduction. It is proposed that it is more plausible that there is slippage from the moderate to the radical neuron doctrine than that there is confusion between the radical neuron doctrine and the trivial version.

According to Gold & Stoljar, one cannot consistently be both reductionist about psychoneural relations and invoke concepts developed in the psychological sciences. I deny the utility of their distinction between biological and cognitive neuroscience, suggesting that they construe biological neuroscience too rigidly and cognitive neuroscience too liberally. Then, I reject their characterization of reductionism. Reductions need not go down past neurobiology straight to physics, and cases of partial, local reduction are not neatly distinguishable from cases of mere implementation. Modifying the argument from unification as reduction, I defend a position weaker than the radical but stronger than the trivial neuron doctrine.

Gold & Stoljar's (G&S's) characterization of the trivial doctrine and of its relationships with the radical one misses some differences that may be crucial. The radical doctrine can be read as a derivative of the computational version of functionalism that provides the backbone of current cognitive science and is fundamentally uninterested in biology: Both doctrines are fundamentally wrong. The synthesis between neurobiology and psychology requires instead that minds be viewed as ontologically primitive, that is, as material properties of functioning bodies. G&S's characterization of the trivial doctrine should therefore be correspondingly modified.

Gold & Stoljar are right in their thesis but incomplete in not pointing out that there are many other arguments from cognate sciences suggesting that a radical eliminativist neuroreductionism is unlikely to be achieved. The radical neuron doctrine they criticize is only a hoped for dogma that cannot be verified, whereas a constrained monistic materialism (with only partial reductionism) is subject to immediate test by applying such criteria as combinatorial complexity and thermodynamic irreversibility.

The complexity of modern neurobiology in even a comparatively restricted area such as use-dependent synaptic plasticity is underestimated by the authors. This leads them to reject a neurobiological model of learning as conceptually parasitic on the psychology of conditioning, on the basis of objections that are shown to be unsustainable. An argument is also advanced that neurobiologists hold an intermediate version of the neuron doctrine rather than a conflated one. In this version, neurobiologists believe that psychology will eventually be underpinned by neurobiology but are agnostic about the extent of upheaval that this will produce in psychology.

When circumscribed brain regions are damaged in humans, highly specific impairments in language, memory, problem solving, and cognition are observed. Neurosurgery such as “split brain” or hemispherectomy, for example, has shown that encompassing regions, the left and right cerebral hemispheres, each control human behavior in unique ways. Observations stretching over 100 years of patients with unilateral focal brain damage have revealed, without the theoretical benefits of “cognitive neuroscience” or “cognitive psychology,” that human behavior is indeed controlled by the brain and its neurons.

Gold & Stoljar's attempt to disentangle the body-mind problem in time for the end of the decade of the brain deserves praise for its diligence and courage in moving onto the treacherous ground of interdisciplinary discourse. In making their point, they should not have stopped half-way: a more clearly defined experimental paradigm seems necessary to solve this exciting and substantial problem.

In one of their arguments against the radical neuron doctrine, Gold & Stoljar (G&S) use the idea that, in certain situations, equivalent terms may not be substitutable into statements that regard properties of the objects to which the terms refer. This device allows G&S to refute the necessity of the conclusion that “the science of the mind equals the science of the brain” even though they take as a premise that the mind equals the brain. I argue, however, that this practice leaves the meaning of the “science of the mind” and the “science of the brain” indeterminate.

Although a wide variety of questions were raised about different aspects of the target article, most of them fall into one of five categories each of which deals with a general question. These questions are (1) Is the radical neuron doctrine really radical? (2) Is the trivial neuron doctrine really trivial? (3) Were we sufficiently critical of the radical neuron doctrine? (4) Is there a distinction to be drawn at all between the two doctrines? and (5) How does our argument bear on related issues in the ontology of mind? Our replies to the objections and observations presented are organized around these five questions.

There are many ways of describing and explaining the properties of living systems; causal, functional, and reductive accounts are necessary but no one account has primacy. The history of biology as a discipline has given excessive authority to reductionism, which collapses higher level accounts, such as social or behavioural ones, into molecular ones. Such reductionism becomes crudely ideological when applied to the human condition, with its claims for genes “for” everything from sexual orientation to compulsive shopping. The current enthusiasm for genetics and ultra-Darwinist accounts, with their selfish-gene metaphors for living processes, misunderstand both the phenomena of development and the interactive role that DNA and the fluid genome play in the cellular orchestra. DNA is not a blueprint, and the four dimensions of life (three of space, one of time) cannot be read off from its one-dimensional strand. Both developmental and evolutionary processes are more than merely instructive or selective; the organism constructs itself, a process known as autopoiesis, through a lifeline trajectory. Because organisms are thermodynamically open systems, living processes are homeodynamic, not homeostatic. The self-organising membrane-bound and energy-utilising metabolic web of the cell must have evolved prior to so-called naked replicators. Evolution is constrained by physics, chemistry, and structure; not all change is powered by natural selection, and not all phenotypes are adaptive. Finally, therefore, living processes are radically indeterminate; like all other living organisms, but to an even greater degree, we make our own future, though in circumstances not of our own choosing.

Lifelines mounts a vigorous attack on sociobiology on the utterly mistaken grounds that sociobiologists believe that genes single-handedly determine social behavior. The many previously published rebuttals to this pernicious criticism are conveniently ignored by the author.

Metaphors have three important functions in scientific discourse: heuristic, rhetorical, and epistemic. I argue that, contrary to prevailing opinion, metaphors are indispensable components of scientific methodology as well as scientific communication. Insofar as the choice of metaphors reflects ideological commitments, all science is ideological. The philosophically vexed question is how to characterize the sense in which science is not merely ideological.

This commentary takes issue with two of Rose's central themes from the perspective of the psychology of intelligence. In the case of reductionism, I argue that Rose fails to live up to his own rhetoric by claiming a veto from his own discipline (biology) over facts of the matter in another (psychology). In the case of “Lifelines,” Rose's argument is contradicted by evidence from both individual differences and developmental change in intelligence.

Evidence reveals numerous cross-cultural universals regarding human mental processes and behavior. Similarly, cross-cultural data are consistent with predictions from theories of kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and sexual selection inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Thus, the “annals of human behaviour” do provide “example[s] fitting the sociobiological bill,” (Lifelines, p. 202) thereby, supporting sociobiological accounts of human behavior.

Steven Rose regards oversimplification of biology as the supreme sin, inevitably leading to evil consequences, and requiring an unique distortion of scientific practice to avoid it. To avoid this, he proposes a short-cut to scientific knowledge by defining certain areas of biology that are intrinsically flawed. But this achieves only a subordination of science to politics. There are no general-purpose shortcuts for evaluating the validity of theories, and no substitutes for testing specific theories using relevant evidence.