Mental Mechanisms

by William Bechtel

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that investigated behavior, while disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and genetics experimented on the brains of non-human animals. In recent decades these disciplines integrated, and with the advent of techniques for imaging activity in human brains, the term cognitive neuroscience has been applied to the integrated investigations of mind and brain. This book is a philosophical examination of how these disciplines continue in the mission of explaining our mental capacities.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Science

322 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Matej · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazingly thorough treatment of issues connected to mechanistic explanations in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience. Bechtel went out of his way to retrace the steps made in in both empirical research and theoretical discussions to their historical roots, and to showcase their subsequent development. I was pleasantly surprised by Bechtel's treatment of biological mechanisms as intrinsically active (a point made with force by theorists of autopoietic enactivism like The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience and Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind). On the other hand, I struggled making it through the last chapter of the book dedicated to issues of free-will and selfhood. Though these are important problems, I felt that Bechtel's defense of compatibilism based in his mechanist outlook was not novel or interesting enough to warrant such a prolonged treatment.

[Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bechtel either solved the mind/body problem AND the free will problem in a single stroke or I'm overreacting. Okay I'm probably overreacting. For now it seems this book is a landmark for me. It'll be interesting to see how it withstands the test of time and further research.

See journal for detailed notes.