In their recent book
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Max Bennett and Peter Hacker attack neural materialism (NM), the view, roughly, that mental states (events, processes, etc.)
are identical with neural states or material properties of neural states (events, processes, etc.). Specifically, in the penultimate
chapter entitled “Reductionism,” they argue that NM is unintelligible, that “there is no sense to literally identifying neural
states and configurations with psychological attributes.” This is a provocative claim indeed. If Bennett and Hacker are right,
then a sizeable number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, etc., subscribe to a view that is not merely
false, but strictly meaningless. In this article I show that Bennett and Hacker's arguments against NM, whether construed
as arguments for the meaninglessness of
or the falsity of the thesis, cannot withstand scrutiny: when laid bare they are found to rest upon highly dubious assumptions
that either seriously mischaracterize or underestimate the resources of the thesis.
Keywords Neural materialism - Neuroscience - Reductionism - Multiple realizability - Criteria of identity - Mereological fallacy