L’agenda ontologica della neuroscienza cognitiva: le neuroscienze come “arbitro” delle categorie psicologiche (e viceversa)
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia August 6, 2016 Marco Viola
The article aims to rationally reconstruct the ontology of cognitive neuroscience by satisfying three requirements: an ontology of cognitive functions that describes any mental operation, an ontology of neural structures that describes any brain part, and a one-to-one correspondence between each cognitive function and a neural structure. It examines assumptions behind these requirements and skeptical arguments against them, then considers counterarguments to the skepticism. The strongest defense of this research agenda is argued to be the empirical success of the heuristics it prescribes. The heuristics show how mutual constraints from psychology and cognitive neuroscience provide criteria for choosing and integrating cognitive functions and neural structures.