Materialism and the unity of science: Natural scientific models of explanation in social science.

Abstract

Can intentional agency be captured in the naturalistic terms which explain physical nature or reduced to physical science in the way that, e.g. Mendelian genetics is explained by molecular genetics? It is widely held that intentional agency is sui generis and that the human sciences are irreducible. They must be either regarded as autonomous disciplines (Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson) or replaced by explanation that meets scientific desiderata (Paul and Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Stich). Materialism then can be at best on ontological thesis, without explanatory punch for human behavior qua agency. These irreducibility claims proceed not from empirical evidence but from untenable empiricist presuppositions about reduction, explanation, and science. When a strong unity of science thesis is stripped of these, strong forms of both reductionism about intentional explanation and materialism about the mental appear more plausible. Reduction should be understood not as a logical derivation on the empiricist model but as elucidation of the mechanisms that constitute phenomena described at the functional level. Talk of mental states is an idealized description of the physical mechanisms which produce behavior; mental states and their representational content are real, physical, and explicable in physical terms. Materialism should be regarded as a thesis about the constitution of these states which may but need not invoke relations of identity. Functionalism should be regarded as the thesis that intentional explanation offers abstract characterizations of the constitutive mechanisms of these states described in ideal-typical (e.g., propositional) terms. The content of intentional stats itself can be naturalistically construed in terms of causal relations between cognitive systems as physical systems as the objects of their beliefs, desires, and other intentional states. These reconstruals underwrite the use of natural scientific models of explanation in the human sciences.