Levels and explanations

Date

2010

Authors

Opie, J.

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Conference paper

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Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (ASCS09), held in Sydney New South Wales Sept 30- Oct 2 2009, 2010 / W. Christensen, E. Schier and J. Sutton (eds.): pp.270-276

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Jon Opie

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Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (9th : 2009 : Sydney, Australia)

Abstract

It is a mainstay of the philosophy of science that reduction is a relationship between theories pitched at different levels of nature. But the relevant sense of “level” is notoriously difficult to pin down. A promising recent analysis links the notion of level to the compositional relations associated with mechanistic explanation. Such relations do not order objects by scale or physical type; one and the same kind of entity can occur at several levels in a single mechanism. I will sketch this approach to levels and consider some of its implications for our understanding of the relationship between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

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Copyright 2009 by the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science

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