Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience

In this book, William Bechtel outlines a new and original program for the philosophy of cognitive science using an original concept of mechanism as its core idea. Bechtel’s concept of mechanism is intended to allow for a naturalized science of the mind that is continuous with the other sciences. Bechtel is a philosopher of science that is interested in how science is actually made and therefore the book is full of examples taken from several researches made in cognitive science. In this book review, I will focus on the philosophical parts of the book and a few illustrative examples. The book is divided into seven chapters. In chapter 1, Bechtel introduces his notion of mechanism. In chapter 2 and 3, Bechtel looks at two mental mechanistic explanations in cognitive science: memory and vision. In chapter 4, Bechtel suggests how a mechanistic explanation of the mental avoids some of the pitfalls of the mind-brain problem. In chapter 5 and 6, Bechtel proposes a mechanistic account of the mental that explains mental representation. In the final chapter, chapter 7, Bechtel argues that this mechanistic view of the mental does not dehumanize people, but instead that our humanity derives from us being a very specific kind of mechanism that is different from all others. There are two main ideas in the book that are intimately related and that have several philosophical consequences. One is Bechtel’s view of what a mechanism is, another is his defence of the scientific practice of reconstructing the phenomenon. In fact, Bechtel’s book is itself an essay on reconstructing the concept of mechanism. I will start with the concept of reconstructing the phenomenon and then introduce Bechtel’s concept of mechanism. Bechtel says that in scientific research we do not always have a clear view of what is the phenomenon about to be studied when we start. Scientists start studying certain mechanisms and might change their mind about what they do throughout their research. Bechtel says: