Reduction in the philosophy of mind

Under a certain interpretation the whole modern philosophy of mind can be conceived as being concerned with issues of reductionism or anti-reductionism – either by trying to free the community from its Cartesian heritage or by trying to reinstall it in modern terms; debates on type- and token-theories, on functionalism, on supervenience, on mechanistic explanations of the mind, on consciousness and on phenomenality bear directly upon or are explicitly concerned with issues of reductionism and anti-reductionism, and it seems that these are not the only ones. Consequently, the questions of (i) what reduction consists in and (ii) whether or not reductionism is true figured among the most prominent in the philosophy of mind, but also in related areas like metaphysics and philosophy of science, in the early second half of the last century. Due to relatively recent developments in the neurosciences, which were enthusiastically described as pushing us towards a natural science of the mind, they have undergone some sort of revival in the past decades. Moreover, recent interpretations of models of reduction seem to suggest that the alleged problems for reductionism, as, for example, posed by arguments which are based on the assumption of the multiple realizability of mental kinds, do not affect the reductionist’s claims at all – identification of mental kinds with disjunctive kinds or with contextualized kinds which are seemingly not (relevantly) multiply realizable form two attempts to reconcile the fact of multiple realizability with reductionism.