Michael Gazzaniga’s Neuro-cognitive Antireductionism and the Challenge of Neo-mechanistic Reduction

Michael Gazzaniga, a prominent cognitive neuroscientist, has argued against reductionist accounts of cognition. Instead, Gazzaniga defends a form of non-reductive physicalism: epistemological neuro-cognitive non-reductionism and ontological monist physicalism. His position is motivated by the theses that: (1) cognitive phenomena can be realized by multiple neural systems; (2) many outcomes of these systems are unpredictable; and (3) multi-level explanations are required. Epistemological neuro-cognitive non-reductionism is presented as the most appropriate stance to account for the way in which phenomena should be explained in cognitive neuroscience. In this paper, I argue, however, that a recent form of (ontological and epistemological) neuro-cognitive reductionism, namely neo-mechanistic reductionism accounts for the arguments presented by Gazzaniga. Thus, the theory offers a more consistent and well-articulated view of the relationship between cognitive and neural phenomena that is specifically compatible with the explanatory strategies and aims of contemporary cognitive neuroscience.