Still Autonomous After All

Abstract

Recent mechanistic philosophers (in particular, Boone and Piccinini in Synthese 193(5):1287–1321, 2016) have argued that the cognitive sciences are not autonomous from neuroscience proper. I clarify two senses of autonomy–metaphysical and epistemic—and argue that cognitive science is still autonomous in both senses. Moreover, mechanistic explanation of cognitive phenomena is not therefore an alternative to the view that cognitive science is autonomous of neuroscience. If anything, it's a way of characterizing just how cognitive processes are implemented by neural mechanisms.

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