Kievit, R. A., Romeijn, J. W., Waldorp, L. J., Wicherts, J. M., Scholte, H. S., & Borsboom, D. (2011). Mind the Gap: A psychometric approach to the reduction problem. Psychological Inquiry, 22(2), 67-87. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2011.550181
[Abstract]Cognitive neuroscience involves the simultaneous analysis of behavioral and neurological data. Common practice in cognitive neuroscience, however, is to limit analyses to the inspection of descriptive measures of association (e.g., correlation coefficients). This practice, often combined with little more than an implicit theoretical stance, fails to address the relationship between neurological and behavioral measures explicitly. This article argues that the reduction problem, in essence, is a measurement problem. As such, it should be solved by using psychometric techniques and models. We show that two influential philosophical theories on this relationship, identity theory and supervenience theory, can be easily translated into psychometric models. Upon such translation, they make explicit hypotheses based on sound theoretical and statistical foundations, which renders them empirically testable. We examine these models, show how they can elucidate our conceptual framework, and examine how they may be used to study foundational questions in cognitive neuroscience. We illustrate these principles by applying them to the relation between personality test scores, intelligence tests, and neurological measures.
Note:
A reply to the comments of this target article by the same authors is Modeling Mind and Matter.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section Philosophy of Mind
Subsection Identity Theory
* The thesis of identity theory was proposed in several forms throughout the latter half of the 20th century. It has its roots in seminal publications such as those of Place (1956) and Smart (1959). In its most commonly accepted interpretation, as described in Lewis (1966), identity theory holds that psychological processes and attributes are identical to their neurological realizations.
The attractiveness of identity theory lies in the relatively nonproblematic assignment of causal powers to mental events. Because a mental event or state is identical to a (particular) neural realization at any given time, it has the same causal powers as the neurological state that realizes it. This implies that in a cognitive neuroscientific study of a particular psychological attribute, one is essentially measuring the same attribute using two different measurements. The P- and N-indicators therefore have a common referent. This conceptualization paints a thoroughly realist picture of psychological attributes, in which the reality of these attributes is grounded in their physical realization.