The 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approach to
Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference

"From Psychological Generalizations to Neuromolecular Mechanisms: Explanations ‘in a Single Bound’"
John Bickle (Invited Speaker)
Mississippi State University

An image still pervades thinking about mind and brain. It influences not just philosophers, but most cognitive and brain scientists. It characterizes both the phenomena to be explained and the sciences that do the explaining. It portrays mind-brain phenomena as multi-level, with compositional relations obtaining between levels, and the various sciences, while overlapping at their edges, as explaining generalizations pitched at specific levels. This image is utterly familiar, and has been diagrammed in many ways in many textbooks in many disciplines.

Pervasive images, however, often produce calcified attitudes. One that this image has produced is the necessity of establishing epistemological relations in a step-by-step fashion. If they relate at all, psychological generalizations can relate only to information processing ones “at the next level down.” Information processing generalizations can relate only to those pertaining to the neural regions that localize and decompose them. Generalizations about neural regions can relate only to those about the circuitries that make them up, and those only to generalizations about their neuronal components, and those only to generalizations about their synaptic and intracellular signaling components, and so on. Any suggestion that science might seek to circumvent this step-wise process, and try to explain or reduce psychological generalizations directly to, e.g., neuronal or even lower-level components, is met with incredulous stares, as though one were suggesting attempting to square circles. Even the “new mechanical” philosophy of science, which proposes full-scale replacement of the old logical empiricist trappings with an alternative account of scientific explanation drawn directly from contemporary biology, keeps sacrosanct this step-wise consequence of the “levels” account of the mind-brain.

There is, however, a hot new field in neuroscience, dubbed ‘molecular and cellular cognition’ (MCC), which is pulling off what this image deems unimaginable, right on the current experimental bench. In this talk I’ll give a representative example of this research—the experimental discovery of the molecular mechanisms of the well-known Ebbinghaus learning effect—and use it to illustrate the general strategy this field employs to “link” mind to molecules experimentally. I’ll then remark upon the scope to which the experimental practices of MCC have already come to dominate mainstream neuroscience. This result might worry practitioners of “higher level” psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, but I’ll close by suggesting the inelminable role that such work provides for the full evidential basis sufficient for claiming to have found a molecular mechanism for a cognitive function. That role, however, is ultimately not one of “explanation.”