Abstract
There are different philosophical views on the nature of scientific theories. Although New Mechanistic Philosophy (NMP) and Structural Realism (SR) are not rival theories strictly speaking, they reinterpret scientific theories by using different kinds of models. While NMP employs mechanistic models, SR depends on structural models to explicate the nature of theories and account for scientific representation. The paper demonstrates that different kinds of models used by NMP and SR result in quite different evaluations of the unificatory claims of a promising theory of cognitive neuroscience (the Free Energy theory). The structural realist construal provides a more charitable reading of the unificatory claims of the Free Energy Principle. Therefore, I conclude, it has an edge over NMP in the present context.
For coming to the final version of this paper, I received constructive comments from Marcin Milkowski and two anonymous reviewers of this volume. The debt is gratefully acknowledged. I also thank the editors of this volume sincerely for their collaboration.
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Notes
- 1.
In my interpretation, they are referring to how actually models. The distinction between how possibly models of mechanisms and how actually models of them is important. The role of components must be identified by forming how actually models of phenomena (Craver 2007, 111 ff.). How possibly models are only heuristically useful. They could be used to specify the underpinning mechanisms loosely and without indicating that the components actually exist and contribute to the explanandum phenomena.
- 2.
My vindication of the unificatory pretences of FEP (or the free energy formulation of PEM) presumes a representationalist, or moderate embodied construal but it does not presume that this is the exclusively correct construal of PEM and FEP. There are also radical embodied and enactivist construal of PEM. The embodied construal is presented in reaction to representationalism (which will be surveyed in the next section). The embodied approach denies that “our most elementary ways of engaging with the world” are representational (Hutto and Myin 2013, 13). The embodied cognition thesis recommends dispensing with the chasm between external features of the world and the internal symbolic representations of the cognitive agent (Varela et al. 1991). Such radical views inspire a radical embodied construal of PEM (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Gallagher and Allen 2016). The embodied approach lays emphasis on the dynamical coupling of the organism with the environment and defines “agent” and its “environment” as a coupled entity. I suspect that an embodied construal of PEM is in line with explanatory pluralism. While this claim is worth discussing in a separate space, in this paper, I won’t consider the bearing of the embodied construal of PEM on the discussion of its unifying power.
- 3.
- 4.
According to this reading, natural selection can be construed as a Bayesian model selection process based upon the adaptive fitness—that is scored by the surprise accumulated by a phenotype (see Allen and Friston 2016).
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Beni, M.D. (2019). Conjuring Cognitive Structures: Towards a Unified Model of Cognition. In: Nepomuceno-Fernández, Á., Magnani, L., Salguero-Lamillar, F., Barés-Gómez, C., Fontaine, M. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. MBR 2018. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32722-4_10
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