Explanatory gap

Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community.

Tesi di laurea triennale in Filosofia, sotto la supervisione del prof. Andrea Zhok. Il knowledge argument di Frank Jackson è stato, fin dalla sua pubblicazione nel 1982, oggetto di intesi dibattiti nell'ambito della filosofia della mente. La tesi ricostruisce l'argomento nei suoi punti di forza e nelle sue criticità, cercando di trovare i motivi che hanno spinto lo stesso autore a rigettarlo.

Thesis for B.A. in Philosophy, under the supervision of prof. Andrea Zhok. The Knowledge argument, by Frank Jackson, has raised many debates in contemporary philosophy of mind, since its publication in 1982. The paper analyses the argument in both its strenghts and weaknesses, aiming to explain the reasons that led the author to reject it.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

The quest to provide a fundamental understanding and explanation of reality is an ambitious one. Perhaps it is too ambitious. The possible restrictions for such an enterprise to be successful must be inquired in order to determine the issue. Section 1 explores one’s understanding in reaching (scientific) conclusions: to what extent does a successful account testify to understanding? Section 2 focuses on the other side of such an account: does it provide an explanation in a more fundamental sense than pointing out causes of phenomena, or is it restricted to such a task? A critical stance vis-à-vis the (scientific) enterprise of unearthing reality’s structure remains necessary in order not to confuse a consistent and productive theory with one that demonstrates an understanding and explanation in the sense of this article.

This thesis aims at laying the groundwork for a research program in philosophy of mind by arguing for two theoretical positions, internalism and representationalism (intentionalism), which are rarely defended jointly, but which together can form the basis for a plausible theory of the mind.

The first chapter argues for internalism against the dominant externalist view. Firstly, it is discussed what the best way is to elucidate the debate between internalism and externalism rooted in the Twin Earth thought experiment. (Putnam 1975) It is argued that the issue between internalists and externalists is whether concrete items that stand in a referential relation to mental states are among the constitutive bases of mental states. The Dry Earth thought experiment (Boghossian 1998) is introduced to make a case for internalism, relying on concepts that do not refer. Externalist counter-arguments are introduced and rejected.

The second chapter argues for representationalism/intentionalism against qualia theory. It is argued that there are no mental qualities (qualia) that account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology. What do account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology are apparent qualities of the intentional objects of conscious experiences, the qualities the world is represented as having by the experiences. Three sets of arguments for qualia are introduced and rejected. The first set of arguments are the type of arguments that are variants of the argument from error, which are rejected by an intentionalist analysis of mentality, and an epistemology of experience is developed where experience provides an acquaintance relation between a subject and something abstract such as a possibility. This makes it unnecessary to postulate epistemic relations both to concretely instantiated items in the environment and to mental items such as qualia or sense-data. Arguments based on allegedly non-representational states such as double vision and afterimages are shown to fail by demonstrating that such states are non-endorsed representations. Arguments that rely on spectrum inversion cases where representational content allegedly differs while qualitative phenomenology stays the same are rejected by arguing against the account of representation that underlies such arguments. (The order of the two chapters is largely arbitrary, though a rejection of externalism is useful in arguing against the argument from spectrum inversion.)

The account is completed by briefly discussing and rejecting the disjunctivist theory of perception, and some other motivations for externalism such as externalism’s advantage in providing a naturalistic account of mentality is discussed. The thesis concludes by pointing at the naturalistic prospects for an account of mentality that analyses mental states as representational states while the representational content is based neither on mental qualities like qualia, nor on causal-informational relations to environmental items. I further speculate about the role of powers and dispositions of organisms that might underpin a future naturalistic analysis of mentality, and also consider the plausibility of a mysterian account of mind where the special mystery regarding the explanatory gap about consciousness is downgraded by suggesting that explanatory gaps might be widespread in nature, such as in our failure to logically link qualities like color and sound as we experience them to the lower-level physical phenomena they supervene on.

Much attention has recently been paid to the idea, which I label 'External World Acquaintance' (EWA), that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is partially constituted by external features. One motivation for EWA which has received relatively little discussion is its alleged ability to help deal with the 'Explanatory Gap' (e.g. Fish 2008, 2009, Langsam 2011, Allen 2016). I provide a reformulation of this general line of thought, which makes clearer how and when EWA could help to explain the specific phenomenal nature of visual experience. In particular, I argue that by focusing on the different kinds of perceptual actions that are available in the case of visual spatial vs. colour perception, we get a natural explanation for why we should expect the specific nature of colour phenomenology to remain less readily intelligible than the specific nature of visual spatial phenomenology. (Forthcoming in Synthese.)

Phenomenal consciousness presents a distinctive explanatory problem. Some regard this problem as ‘hard’, which has troubling implications for the science and metaphysics of consciousness. Some regard it as ‘easy’, which ignores the special explanatory difficulties that consciousness offers. Others are unable to decide between these two uncomfortable positions. All three camps assume that the problem of consciousness is either easy or hard. I argue against this disjunction and suggest that the problem may be ‘tricky’—that is, partly easy and partly hard. This possibility emerges when we recognise that consciousness raises two explanatory questions. The Consciousness Question concerns why a subject is conscious rather than unconscious. The Character Question concerns why a conscious subject’s experience has the phenomenology it has rather than some other. I explore the possibility of one or other of these explanatory challenges being hard and the other easy, and consider the dialectical ramifications this has for all sides of the debate.

Recently, it has been suggested that the notion of (metaphysical) ground has an important role to play in developing physicalism about mentality. For there are reasons to think that Grounding Physicalism About Mentality (GPM) has advantages over traditional reductive and non-reductive versions of physicalism about mentality. In this paper, I argue that a new spin on an old objection to physicalism--that it leaves an "explanatory gap"—undermines the enthusiasm for GPM. I start by arguing that truths about the essences of things have an important role to play in explaining certain grounding phenomena. I then argue that this ultimately creates a dilemma for GPM: either GPM leaves a distinctive explanatory gap, or it collapses into a version of reductive physicalism.

Osnovni cilj ovog rada je prikazivanje problema eksplanatornog jaza u savremenoj filozofiji duha, poznatog još pod nazivom “težak” problem. Naglasak je stavljen na dve suprotstavljene struje mišljenja u pogledu ovog pitanja: dualizam i materijalizam, i njihovo viđenje, odnosno prihvatanje ili odbacivanje problema. Autor putem navođenja različitih primera daje objašnjenje najvažnijih pojmova koji proishode iz sučeljavanja ove dve struje mišljenja, i određuje fundamentalnu razliku između epistemološke i metafizičke vrste eksplanatornog jaza sa posebnim osvrtom na problem kvalija.   
Ključne reči: težak problem, kvalije, svest, eksplanatorni jaz, fizikalizam, dualizam.

In this paper, I argue against the phenomenal concept strategy (henceforth PCS) and in favor of what Chalmers has called type-A materialism ([2006], [2010] p. 111). On her release, Mary makes no cognitive discovery at all; not even a thin non-possibility-eliminating discovery, as Tye has recently claimed [2012]. When she is imprisoned, Mary already knows everything that is to be known about the phenomenal character of her experiences. What Mary acquires is a new non-cognitive and nonconceptual representation.

Illusionism is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion.  The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why it so powerfully seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious.  Here, I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem, the ‘False Inference Theory’ or ‘FIT’.  I argue that by considering three features of our minds—which I call introspective opacity, the infallibility intuition, and the justification constraint—we can explain our powerful disposition to draw a specific set of false inferences about our sensory states.  I argue that being subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness consists in having this disposition. I also explain the intuitive ineffability, intrinsicality, and subjectivity of phenomenal properties and propose a solution to the illusion meta-problem (Kammerer 2016, 2018, 2019), which challenges us to explain why illusionism strikes us as a deeply counterintuitive view.

This article defends mirror-neuron based embodied simulation (MNBES) from four criticisms. First, the charge that MNBES cannot account for action understanding because it cannot account for the propositional attitude of intention fails, because embodied simulation proffers a "bottom-up" account of action understanding. Second, like much neurological science, MNBES is underwritten by an assumed correlation between cognitive functional processes (i.e. simulation) and neurological mechanisms (i.e. mirror neurons), and to demand mirror-neuron theorists close the explanatory gap asks too much. Third, MNBES has been criticized because it fails to provide an account of the necessary and sufficient conditions of social cognition, but I show that neurological accounts, like most empirical science, do not aim to meet this philosophical standard. In the final section I argue that the shared representation of goals supervenes on mirror-neuron activity.

Naturalism is currently the most vibrantly developing approach to philosophy, with naturalised methodologies being applied across all the philosophical disciplines. One of the areas naturalism has been focussing upon is the mind, traditionally viewed as a topic hard to reconcile with the naturalistic worldview. A number of questions have been pursued in this context. What is the place of the mind in the world? How should we study the mind as a natural phenomenon? What is the significance of cognitive science research for philosophical debates?

In this book, philosophical questions about the mind are asked in the context of recent developments in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, psychology, and the project of naturalisation. Much of the focus is upon what we have learned by studying natural mental mechanisms as well as designing artificial ones. In the case of natural mental mechanisms, this includes consideration of such issues as the significance of deficits in these mechanisms for psychiatry. The significance of the evolutionary context for mental mechanisms as well as questions regarding rationality and wisdom is also explored. Mechanistic and functional models of the mind are used to throw new light on discussions regarding issues of explanation, reduction and the realisation of mental phenomena. Finally, naturalistic approaches are used to look anew at such traditional philosophical issues as the correspondence of mind to world and presuppositions of scientific research.

What Exactly is the Explanatory Gap? mind-brain identities that we discover will be akin to such paradigmatic a posteriori scientific identities as that water is H2O, or that temperature is mean kinetic energy. And, finally, let us take it that there is good scientific evidence for the existence of such mind-brain identities. In some cases we will have direct evidence for the co-occurrence of specific conscious and material kinds. And even when we lack such direct evidence, there is more general evidence, in the form of the 'causal closure' of the physical realm, which argues that each conscious kind must be identical to some material kind (even if we don't know which), otherwise conscious causes couldn't have the physical effects they manifestly do have. (Cf. Papineau 2002 Ch 1 and Appendix.) Even so, as Joseph Levine pointed out nearly thirty years ago, mind-brain identities strike us quite differently from the supposedly analogous scientific identities. (Levine 1983.) Suppose that we really did have good evidence that pain is one and the same as the firing of C-fibres. Wouldn't we still want to know why there is pain when C-fibres are firing? Why do C-fibres firings feel like that, rather than like something else, or like nothing at all? No analogous questions press in on us in the scientific cases. After we find out that water is H2O, we don't feel that we still need to know why there is water when there is H2O, or why H2O manifests itself as water rather than in some other way. Water is H2O-and that's that. Levine coined the phrase 'the explanatory gap' for the impression that there is something left unexplained by mind-brain identities.

With substance dualism and the existence of God, Swinburne (2004) and Moreland (2010) have argued for a very powerful explanatory mechanism that can readily explain several philosophical problems related to consciousness. However, their positions come with presuppositions and ontological commitments which many are not prepared to share. The aim of this paper is to improve on the Swinburne-Moreland argument from consciousness by developing an argument for the existence of God from consciousness without being committed to substance dualism. The argument proceeds by suggesting a solution to the exceptional-point-of-view problem, i.e., the question how it can be explained that there is a conscious being lucky enough to experience the point of view of a relatively tiny brain amidst a giant universe that is indifferent about which physical entities it brings about according to the laws of physics.

Sensorimotor Theory (SMT) is the claim that it is our practical know-how of the relations between our environments and us that gives our environmental interactions their experiential qualities. Yet why should such interactions involve or be accompanied by experience? This is the 'absolute' gap question. Some proponents of SMT answer this question by arguing that our interactions with an environment involve experience when we cognitively access those interactions. In this paper, I aim to persuade proponents of SMT to accept the following three claims. First, that appeals to cognitive access fail to answer the absolute gap question. Second, that SMT can be read in a way that rejects the gap question. Third, that if proponents of SMT are prepared to read SMT in a way that rejects the absolute gap question, then they can also reject the claim that cognitive access is needed to explain experience.

Intuitively, physicalism is the thesis that there's nothing Ôover and above' the physical. Going beyond this intuitive formulation requires an account of what it is for a property, kind, relation, or object to be a physical one. Here I defend an unfamiliar implementation of the familiar strategy of defining physical properties, etc. as those posited by the complete and ideal physical theory. That implementation ties being a physical theory to being a theory with the hallmarks of scientific theories and then identifies physical theories among the scientific ones by their characteristic subject matter, roughly, the world's relatively fundamental elements. I then argue that, fully fleshed out, such an account is able to satisfy an array of constraints on any account of the physical, as well as avoid a number of prima facie objections, without imposing Wilson's No Fundamental Mentality Constraint.

He took his doctorate with William F. Pinar at Louisiana State University and taught at various universities in the USA for 12 years before returning home to Canada. He publishes widely on learning theory and philosophy of mind. He is editor-at-large for the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research.

Intuitively, physicalism is the thesis that there's nothing Ôover and above' the physical. Going beyond this intuitive formulation requires an account of what it is for a property, kind, relation, or object to be a physical one. Here I defend an unfamiliar implementation of the familiar strategy of defining physical properties, etc. as those posited by the complete and ideal physical theory. That implementation ties being a physical theory to being a theory with the hallmarks of scientific theories and then identifies physical theories among the scientific ones by their characteristic subject matter, roughly, the world's relatively fundamental elements. I then argue that, fully fleshed out, such an account is able to satisfy an array of constraints on any account of the physical, as well as avoid a number of prima facie objections, without imposing Wilson's No Fundamental Mentality Constraint.

RÉSUMÉ. — Cet article explore une solution de rechange au physicalisme qui n’est ni le défi métaphysique de Jackson et de Kripke, ni le défi épistémologique de Nagel, Levine et McGinn. D’après cette autre thèse, le fossé entre l’esprit et le corps n’est ni ontologique ni épistémologique, mais sémantique. Je soutiens que c’est parce que le fossé est sémantique que le problème corps-esprit (mind-body problem) est par essence un problème philosophique qui ne dispa raîtra vraisemblablement pas avec le progrès de nos connaissances en sciences naturelles.

О прОблеме ОбъяснительнОгО прОвала в филОсОфии сОзнания и.е. прись § 1. Проблема объяснительного провала Проблема объяснительного провала и соответству-ющии� термин были введены Жозефом Левиным 1. Левин аргументировал, что феноменальные свои�ства опыта не могут быть выведены a priori исходя 1

La psicopatología contemporánea sufre de una brecha descriptiva (descriptive gap)
respecto de la experiencia patológica, y la tradición de la psicopatología contiene un
capital descriptivo acumulado que debe ser explotado para la necesaria superación
de este déficit. Se argumenta examinando el caso particular de la psicopatología
cognitiva de la esquizofrenia y del contenido de la experiencia del delirio de control,
mostrando cómo la teoría de Henri Ey, así como la del automatismo mental del siglo
xix en la cual tiene sus raíces, contienen herramientas descriptivas importantes para
establecer que la experiencia de un delirio de control es esencialmente diferente de
la experiencia de una simple ilusión de control.

The Multiple Realizability Thesis, stating that one mental state can have at least two physical realizers, was considered as supporting anti-reductionism about mental states in general. But recently, Multiple Realizability has become a main issue regarding physicalism about consciousness, in relation to the explanatory gap that there is no explanation about a correlation between a neural and a conscious state. I aim to formulate Cognitive Neurofunctionalism as a reductive theory about consciousness which is compatible with Multiple Realizability. Cognitive Neurofunctionalism appeals to cutting-edge cognitive neuroscience to maintain reduction; at the same time, it makes reduction compatible with Multiple Realizability by virtue of a functional interpretation of a neural state. This means that Cognitive Neurofunctionalism is a better physicalistic theory than type-identity theory or reduction in defying the explanatory gap.

This is my bridge for the explanatory gap.  Topics include:  Nagel's footnote 11, phenomenal concepts, sensory imagination, thought bubbles, theory of mind...strong transparency.  Forthcoming in Nous.

Abstract:  It is often held that in imagining experiences we exploit a special imagistic way of representing mentality—one that enables us to think about mental states in terms of what it is like to have them. According to some, when this way of thinking about the mind is paired with more objective means, an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical features of mental states arises. This paper advances a view along those lines, but with a twist. What many take for a special imagistic way of thinking about experiences is instead a special way of misconstruing them. It is this tendency to misrepresent experiences through the use of imagery that gives rise to the appearance of an explanatory gap. The pervasiveness and tenacity of this misrepresentational reflex can be traced to its roots in a particular heuristic for monitoring and remembering the mental states of others.

I strongly agree with Kirchhoff and Hutto that consciousness and embodied action are one and the same, but I disagree when they say this identity cannot be fully explained and must sim- ply be posited. Here I attempt to sketch the outlines of just such an explanation.

Conservatives claim that all phenomenal properties are sensory. Liberals countenance non-sensory phenomenal properties such as what it’s like to perceive some high-level property, and what it’s like to think that p. A hallmark of phenomenal properties is that they present an explanatory gap, so to resolve the dispute we should consider whether experience has non-sensory properties that appear ‘gappy’. The classic tests for ‘gappiness’ are the invertibility test and the zombifiability test. I suggest that these tests yield conflicting results: non-sensory properties lend themselves to zombie scenarios but not to inversion scenarios. Which test should we trust? Against Carruthers & Veillet (2011), I argue that invertibility is not a viable condition of phenomenality. In contrast, being zombifiable is credibly necessary and sufficient for phenomenality. I conclude that there are non-sensory properties of experience that are ‘gappy’ in the right way, and that liberalism is therefore the most plausible position.

With substance dualism and the existence of God, Swinburne (2004, The Existence of God, Oxford University Press, Oxford) and Moreland (2010, Consciousness and the Existence of God, Routledge, New York) have argued for a very powerful explanatory mechanism that can readily explain several philosophical problems related to consciousness. However, their positions come with presuppositions and ontological commitments which many are not prepared to share. The aim of this paper is to improve on the Swinburne-Moreland argument from consciousness by developing an argument for the existence of God from consciousness without being committed to substance dualism. The argument proceeds by suggesting a solution to the exceptional-point-of-view problem, i.e., the question how it can be explained that there is a conscious being lucky enough to experience the point of view of a relatively tiny brain amidst a giant universe that is indifferent about which physical entities it brings about according ...

Though there is much else in Levine's book that is also worthy of discussion, this critical study focuses exclusively on his central positive thesis that phenomenal consciousness exhibits two features that “both resist explanatory reduction to the physical: subjectivity and qualitative character” (p. 175).

Odgovor na Kripkejev izziv: kako se nam lahko zdi a posteriorna nujnost kontingentno resnična ? Kripkejev izziv je zahteva po pojasnitvi videza kontingence v primeru a posteriorne identitete duha in telesa. Videz kontingence je prisoten pri propozicijah, ki so a posteriorne identitete. Večina tovrstnih identitet ni spornih, ker lahko na Kripkejev način brezhibno pojasnimo videz kontingence. Slednja je namreč prisotna, kadar en člen v identiteti referira kontingentno. Pri identiteti mentalnega in fizičnega pa kontingentno referiranje ne nastopa, zaradi česar Kripke meni, da je videz kontingence v primeru duha in telesa nepojasnljiv. Članek dokazuje, da je videz kontingence je možno pojasniti na drug način s pomočjo t. i. sklicevanja na intuicije, natančneje s pomočjo intuicije različnosti.

Ključne besede: argument iz zamisljivosti, identiteta duha in telesa, videz kontingence, Kripke, intuicija različnosti.

According to Sandro Nannini's Time and Consciousness in Cognitive Naturalism, we can draw an analogy between the shift in the conception of time that occurred in physics with the introduction of relativity theory and a shift towards a scientifically more graspable functional concept of phenomenal consciousness. This analogy is meant to persuade us of the eliminative materialist view that we should abandon our folk psychological concept of consciousness. In my commentary, I examine the naturaliza-tion procedure underlying Nannini's cognitive naturalism, argue for its inability to account for the phenomenal feel of conscious states, and point to some important differences between the conceptual change in the case of time and the intended change in the case of consciousness.

With substance dualism and the existence of God, Swinburne (2004, The Existence of God, Oxford University Press, Oxford) and Moreland (2010, Consciousness and the Existence of God, Routledge, New York) have argued for a very powerful explanatory mechanism that can readily explain several philosophical problems related to consciousness. However, their positions come with presuppositions and ontological commitments which many are not prepared to share. The aim of this paper is to improve on the Swinburne-Moreland argument from consciousness by developing an argument for the existence of God from consciousness without being committed to substance dualism. The argument proceeds by suggesting a solution to the exceptional-point-of-view problem, i.e., the question how it can be explained that there is a conscious being lucky enough to experience the point of view of a relatively tiny brain amidst a giant universe that is indifferent about which physical entities it brings about according ...

Abstract: According to Sandro Nannini’s Time and Consciousness in Cognitive Naturalism , we can draw an analogy between the shift in the conception of time that occurred in physics with the introduction of relativity theory and a shift towards a scientifically more graspable functional concept of phenomenal consciousness. This analogy is meant to persuade us of the eliminative materialist view that we should abandon our folk psychological concept of consciousness. In my commentary, I examine the naturalization procedure underlying Nannini’s cognitive naturalism, argue for its inability to account for the phenomenal feel of conscious states, and point to some important differences between the conceptual change in the case of time and the intended change in the case of consciousness. Keywords:  Eliminative Materialism; Phenomenal Consciousness; Explanatory Gap; Hard Problem; Cognitive Naturalism. Naturalismo cognitivo e sensazioni fenomeniche Riassunto:  In Time and Consciousness in C...

Illusionism is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion.  The illusion problem (Frankish 2016) is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why it so powerfully seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious.  Here, I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem, the ‘False Inference Theory’ or ‘FIT’.  I argue that by considering three plausible hypotheses about our minds—which I call introspective opacity, the infallibility intuition, and the justification constraint—we can explain our powerful disposition to draw a specific set of false inferences about our sensory states.  I argue that being subject to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness consists in having this disposition. I also explain the intuitive ineffability, intrinsicality, and subjectivity of phenomenal properties and propose a solution to the illusion meta-problem (Kammerer 2016, 2018, 2019), which challenges us to explain why illusionism strikes us as a deeply counterintuitive view.

This writing attempts to capture mind and matter to rational description by focusing on disparity between scientific method as it extracts concepts and discards particulars and ordinary cognitive functioning that extends from proximal experience. Discourse underlined with the concept of strict uniqueness of world entities is intended to examine critically paradox and solution efforts in the mathematical and cosmological sciences as problems of zero, infinity: vast and small numbers and discreteness are addressed.

The development of fMRI techniques has generated a boom of neuroscience research across the psychological sciences, and revealed neural correlates for many psychological phenomena seen as central to the human experience (e.g., morality, agency). Meanwhile, the rise of neuroscience has reignited old debates over mind-body dualism and the soul. While some scientists use neuroscience to bolster a material account of consciousness, others point to unexplained neural phenomena to defend dualism and a spiritual perspective on the mind. In two experiments we examine how exposure to neuroscience research impacts belief in the soul. We find that belief in soul decreases when neuroscience provides strong mechanistic explanations for mind. But when explanatory gaps in neuroscience research are emphasized, belief in soul is enhanced, suggesting that physical and metaphysical explanations may be used reflexively as alternative theories for mind. Implications for the future of belief in soul and neuroscience research are discussed.

This paper challenges a popular thesis which we call the explanatory primitiveness thesis (for short, EPT), namely, the thesis that identities leave no logical space wherein explanatory questions may be formulated and explanatory gaps may reside. We argue that while EPT is, in all likelihood, flawless when the relevant domain consists of identity statements flanked by proper names of individuals it is a mistake to hold that the thesis generalizes to cover all identity statements. In particular, we argue that EPT fails decisively with respect to an important class of identity statements, viz., those in which natural kinds are identified across different theoretical levels (i.e., the so-called inter-level type-identities). If correct, our result shows EPT to be much more limited in scope than is usually supposed. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, it shows that there is no inherent absurdity in the idea that certain type-identity statements, in particular psychophysical type-identity statements, suffer from an explanatory gap.