Todorović, T., & Bregant, J. (2025). At the Edge of Understanding: A Dialogue on Gaps in Cognitive Science Ars & Humanitas, 19(1), 33-50. doi:10.4312/ars.19.1.33-50
[Abstract]The article reevaluates Jerry Fodor’s key argument for the autonomy of the special sciences, which rests on the notion of multiple realization and the claim that special science predicates must be natural kinds. After outlining how Fodor’s view was shaped by the “syntactic” conception of scientific theories, it shows that the recent “semantic” approach in scientific theories challenges the idea that special science kinds must be natural and ontologically committing. On the semantic account, scientific models often invoke idealized or domain-specific predicates that do not have to be natural. We use Fodor’s example – Gresham’s law – to articulate a semantic perspective that preserves the unity of science: higher-level explanations can remain useful, real, and relatively autonomous without irreducible natural kinds. By “sacrificing” natural kinds, we retain the explanatory powers of the special sciences, create a simpler ontological picture of the world, and justify the modus operandi of the sciences, such as cognitive science, where knowledge from the different levels or disciplines that constitute it informs and refines our overall understanding of the world.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 2 Main Motivation for Multiple Realization
* The main motivation for the argument from multiple realization is the rejection of the identity theory (or psychophysical reductionism), where the identity theory, first articulated by Place (Place, 1956) and Feigl (Feigl, 1967), can be summarized with Smart’s slogan that “sensations are nothing over and above brain processes” (Smart, 1959, p. 145). The identity theory claims that mental kinds (such as pain, belief, and love) are identical to specific physical (neurological or neurochemical) kinds in the sense that any organism with a mental state M, e.g., pain, is in a specific physical state N and any organism with a physical state N is in a mental state M, e.g., pain. Thus, being in pain is the same as being in a physical state N. The father of the multiple realization thesis was Hilary Putnam. He developed the concept in a series of articles in the 1960s and 1970s (Putnam, 1960, 1967, 1975a, 1975b), with the aim as follows. If the identity theory is true, then all different creatures (humans, reptiles, mollusks, etc.) that are in the same mental state, for example, in pain, also must be in the same neurophysiological state, for example, in X (Putnam, 1967). Yet, Putnam argues, this looks extremely counterintuitive given the diversity of nature and the process of evolution: it seems almost impossible that all these creatures, which have evolved in quite different ways, would have the same neurophysiological realizers (Putnam, 1967).