When Two Levels Collide

Abstract

AbstractWhen philosophers and scientists reflect on how explanations across “levels” of nature’s organization relate, typically they focus on successful instances in which the counterpart higher and lower level explanations align relatively smoothly with one another. But counterpart cross-level explanations don’t always link up successfully. Here I focus first on a detailed case in which an explanation of the Ebbinghaus spacing effect in memory acquisition from the neuroscience field of ‘molecular and cellular cognition’ (MCC) fails to link smoothly with explanations of that effect from cognitive science. It is not clear exactly what to say philosophically about cross-level explanatory mismatches like this one, although a commonly-held assumption that explanations in cognitive science should be “neurally plausible” precludes some responses. In a second example drawn from recent work on visual attention I show that it is not just counterpart explanations, but sometimes counterpart phenomena characterized across levels that fail to match smoothly. Such cross-level mismatches are not unique to the cognitive and brain sciences and must be considered real possibilities across all of science, especially as increasingly lower level sciences begin to explain data that have been specific to some higher level counterpart.