Come to Duke's Philosophy Department and enjoy a talk by Daniel Burnston, Associate Professor and Director of Cognitive Studies at Tulane University.
"A Reductionist Approach to Decision-Making"
Anti-reductionism about commonsense psychological concepts is something of a consensus view in philosophy of mind. If this is right, then we can understand the nature of concepts like 'belief', 'intention', and 'decision' independently of insights from the neurosciences. I argue, contra this view, that neuroscience is rapidly progressing towards reducing the commonsense notion of 'decision'. I begin by articulating a view of epistemic reduction based on Ernst Nagel's notion of "connectability." I then introduce "accumulation to bound" models of decision-making from the neurosciences and argue that explanation with these models meets this characterization. I then tackle two sets of intuitions about psychological kinds: that they are inherently normative and that they are inherently phenomenal. I argue that, far from being a barrier to reduction, accumulation to bound models provide us with deep insight into the normative and phenomenal properties of the kind 'decision'.