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Memory Consolidation, Multiple Realizations, and Modest Reductions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jacqueline Anne Sullivan
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Abstract

This article investigates several consequences of a recent trend in philosophy of mind to shift the relata of realization from mental state–physical state to function-mechanism. It is shown, by applying both frameworks to the neuroscientific case study of memory consolidation, that, although this shift can be used to avoid the immediate antireductionist consequences of the traditional argument from multiple realizability, what is gained is a far more modest form of reductionism than recent philosophical accounts have intimated and neuroscientists themselves have claimed.

Type
Multiple Realizability, Explanation, and Special Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 75 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2006 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers. Edited by Cristina Bicchieri and Jason Alexander , December 2008 , pp. 501 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

The author would like to thank Tom Polger for organizing the PSA 2007 symposium on multiple realization and Ken Aizawa for writing a paper for the Society of Philosophy and Psychology Meeting held at Wake Forest University in June 2005, which prompted my interest in the issues I address in this article.

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