Philosophy Of Science

To appear in S. Sarkar (ed.) The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge Press, 2005.

PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Robert A. Wilson University of Alberta 1. Introduction In the good old days, when general philosophy of science ruled the Earth, a simple division was often invoked to talk about philosophical issues specific to particular kinds of science: that between thenatural sciences and the social sciences. Over the last 20 years, philosophical studies shaped around this dichotomy have given way to those organized by more fine-grained categories, corresponding to specific disciplines, as the literatures on the philosophy of physics, biology, economics and psychology--to take the most prominent four examples--have blossomed. In general terms, work in each of theseareas has become increasingly enmeshed with that in the corresponding science itself, increasingly naturalistic (in at least one sense of that term), and in my view, increasingly interesting. The philosophy of psychology is concerned with mind and cognition. When psychology cut itself loose institutionally and professionally from philosophy in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, itwas the discipline that predominantly studied mind and cognition. This has changed over the last 30 years. With the development of artificial intelligence, cognitive anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience--perhaps, together with psychology, best referred to collectively as "the cognitive sciences" (Wilson and Keil 1999)-philosophers of psychology have found themselves both drawing on andcontributing to scientific work in this more interdisciplinary milieu. There are two consequences of this. The first is that the field has become increasingly entwined with the philosophical aspects to cognitive science. My own view is that we do greater justice to the interdisciplinary motivations behind cognitive science by placing an emphasis on the cognitive sciences, rather than on anyfoundational assumptions that constitute a paradigm, cognitive science (see COGNITIVE SCIENCE). Thus, I view the philosophical aspects to the cognitive sciences as occupying the greater part of the philosophy of

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psychology (cf. Wilson 1999). The second is that the more lively areas or topics of contemporary discussion in the philosophy of psychology are quite diverse, including (for example)philosophical issues in neuroscience, the nature and physical bases of consciousness, the evolution of mind, and the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of intentional states in human agents. Despite the first of these points, and contributing to the second, the material that philosophers of psychology discuss also covers questions about the mind and areas of psychology that even my own pluralistic(licentious?) conception of the cognitive sciences excludes. Here I have in mind debates over the scientific status of psychoanalysis, questions about the foundations of the taxonomy of psychopathology, and discussions of the nature of social psychology, all of which concern areas of psychology other than cognitive psychology. What further complicates any simple characterization of work in thephilosophy of psychology, and to some extent what distinguishes it from the other "philosophy of x" studies within the philosophy of science, is its close relationship to a traditional area of philosophy, the philosophy of mind, that has not typically viewed itself as a part of the philosophy of science at all. Thus, many of the topics that philosophers of psychology discuss that arise from theirreflection on the cognitive sciences have analogues in traditional philosophy of mind. For example, concerns about the causal role of semantic or representational level properties in computational theories of cognition echo the more general problem of mental causation; many of the issues about the nature of cognitive architecture that separate, for example, "classic" from connectionist approaches...