Non-Reductive Integration in Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Multiple Systems Model and Situated Concepts

Abstract

In a companion piece to this paper (Faucher 2012), I adopted John Bickle’s “new wave meta-scientific” stance (i.e. a bottom-up philosophy of science that tries to capture the sense of some concepts — like the concept of reduction — as it emerges from the sciences, “independent of any pre-theoretic or ‘philosophical’ account of these concepts” (Bickle 2003, 31)) and argued that reductionism does not capture the relationships between domains or theories in cognitive neuroscience. More precisely, I argued against the notion that classical reductionism as well as “meta-scientific reductionism” should apply across the board in neuroscience, and defended the idea that relations between fields (and theories inside them) in some parts of social cognitive neurosciences are integrative but in a non-reductive way. In this paper, I will illustrate this idea with an example drawn from social cognitive neuroscience (SCN henceforth) of racial prejudice. As I will demonstrate, in this field the nature of relationships between the disciplines that form the core of SCN has evolved over the years, without giving way to reduction. More precisely, I will show how establishing links between social psychology and cognitive neuroscience has allowed the formulation of a new hypothesis about the nature of implicit representations. In light of this, I will also propose that SCN of racial prejudice should consider some theoretical resources from a related field — that of “embodied” or “situated” cognition.KeywordsSocial CognitionCognitive NeuroscienceImplicit Association TestSemantic KnowledgeImplicit AttitudeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.