Abstract

The dominant tradition in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences has assumed that human minds can be realized in many other kinds of brains and the mind is a fairly autonomous component residing in the body. In The Mind Incarnate, Stuart Shapiro labels these the multiple realizability thesis and the separability thesis and sets them in opposition to two alternative theses that he advances: the mental constraint thesis and the embodied mind thesis. Although Shapiro has very interesting things to say on behalf of the embodied mind thesis, by far his more significant contribution is his argument on behalf of the mental constraint hypothesis and hence against the multiple realizability thesis. Although there were a number of early dissenters from the multiple realizability thesis, as a result of arguments by Putnam and Fodor, it came to be regarded through most of the 1980s and 1990s as a simple truism. It has provided the chief argument against the reduction of psychology to neuroscience and for an autonomous psychology.