Lycan’s Account and Levels of Organization--论文代写范文精选

理解心理能力在纯粹的功能术语，分解为基本的理论。狼人确实认为分解产生的是一样的，在自然的层次结构中。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
Although this account has many attractive features, there are reasons to be skeptical about the way that it construes the relationship between psychological capacities and neurobiological activities. The source of the problem is that Lycan employs a single type of hierarchy, his levels of nature. Because he takes it that the hierarchy created by homuncular functionalism is part of the hierarchy of levels of nature, everything that is included in his account has to have a place on some level of nature. Consequently, everything is given the same ontological status. Entities occur at different places on the hierarchy, but, according to Lycan, all are found in nature and all can be characterized both functionally and structurally. 

It is far from clear, however, that the hierarchy created by homuncular functionalism really is part of the hierarchy of levels of nature or that everything that Lycan includes in his account should have the same ontological status. It is useful to note that the alternative is to understand psychological capacities in purely functional terms and to treat the functional decomposition as a largely theoretical endeavor. When the functional decomposition is purely theoretical (so to speak), the sub- 6 capacities and sub-sub-capacities have an explanatory role, but they are not intended to occupy different levels of nature. 

This is what we find in Cummins’ account of functional analysis (1975, 1983), and so following Cummins’ account would not provide any grounds for mapping the functional (i.e., homuncular) decomposition onto the hierarchy of levels of nature. But, of course, Lycan does think that the levels created by the homuncular decomposition are the same as part of the hierarchy of levels of nature. One result of Lycan’s position is that every entity in the hierarchy created by the decomposition of a psychological capacity has to have functional (i.e., relational) as well as intrinsic (i.e., non-relational) properties. There must be, on the one hand, the component’s function, but also stuff that it is made out of. But there is nothing about psychological abilities themselves that requires us to understand these functionally defined capacities as entities that have intrinsic properties that are different from the intrinsic properties of lower level entities. (Or otherwise stated, there is no reason to think that psychological capacities are made out of stuff that is different—in some way—than the stuff that lower level entities are made out of.)

Plus Lycan has not actually found a physical device that can be identified with a functionally characterized capacity, for example, in the way that a pumper of blood has been identified with the physical organ that we call the heart. Consider the face recognizer example again. On Lycan’s model a psychological entity such as the face recognizer has to be a physical device that is not just a collection of neurobiological entities (e.g., neurons), even if it can be decomposed into a collection of neurobiological entities. But these sorts of physical devices are not exactly lying around to help substantiate Lycan’s model. 

Furthermore, it is also worth noting that if a psychological capacity does not have an explicitly physical characterization, then the decomposition of the psychological to the neurobiological is impossible. A functional capacity can be decomposed into subcapacities by employing Cummins-style functional analysis, and a physical system can be decomposed into its component parts. But the move from the functional decomposition to the physical decomposition is not simply another step in the decomposition. Rather, the move from the functional to the physical is an identification—the identification of the physical parts that carry out a particular function or set of functions. It might be helpful at this point to look, in a more general way, at the nature of the problem that Lycan’s model encounters. Consider two sets of things. Set (1) is atoms, molecules, and a cell. 

Set (2) is a segment of deoxyribonucleic acid, a gene, and a carrier of hereditary information. In (1)—leaving our reductionist tendencies aside—the three can be understood as different physical things, the latter composed of the former. In (2) the relationship is different. In this case, there is no way to understand these three as different physical entities. The only explicitly physical stuff is the segment of DNA; the others, the gene and the carrier of hereditary information, are just different ways of describing this physical material. 

The difference between these two sets of things demonstrates where Lycan goes wrong. The entities in (1) clearly exhibit the hierarchical organization that Lycan relies 7 on, and Lycan’s account is capable of describing a relationship like the one between cells and atoms. The things in (2), meanwhile, cannot be put into the same sort of hierarchy. This is because a carrier of hereditary information is a functional description that does not have any intrinsic properties besides those of the DNA. Thus, a carrier of hereditary information cannot be decomposed into a gene and a gene cannot be decomposed into a segment of DNA. 

Rather, a carrier of hereditary information just is a segment of DNA. And the same goes for the gene: it just is a segment of DNA. Consequently, Lycan’s account is not useful for understanding the relationship between a carrier of hereditary information and DNA (or between a gene and DNA). Lycan errs by not realizing that the relationship between psychological capacities and neurobiological activities is similar to the relationship between the carrier of hereditary information and a segment of DNA. Because there is no “stuff” that a psychological capacity is besides a collection of neurobiological entities and their activities, it is a mistake to think that psychological capacities and neurobiological entities occupy different levels in a hierarchy of levels of nature. And as a result, the relationship between the psychological and the neurobiological cannot be as Lycan describes it.

A more satisfactory account can be developed if multiple hierarchies are used. One hierarchy is needed to organize the things that are found in nature, but a separate set of levels is needed to track the different descriptions of the things found in nature. To this end, the account developed here uses levels of organization to order the things that are found in nature and levels of explanation for the descriptions of these things. This section will examine levels of organization and explain how they should be understood. In the next section, the same will be done for levels of explanation. 

Although levels of organization are similar to Lycan’s levels of nature, it is worth looking at a couple of the specific features of levels of organization in order to understand the role that these levels have in this account. The first important feature is the composition relation. The entities at one level are composed of the entities found at lower levels, and so composition orders the levels in the hierarchy. But composition alone cannot be used to establish a hierarchy of levels of organization. If it were, then a new level would be created every time two entities were combined, and this would create far too many levels. The resulting hierarchy would not be helpful for thinking about how nature is organized. 

Therefore, in addition to composition, another feature needs to be invoked. The two usual candidates are either structure or interaction. When structure is a feature of levels of organization, levels are specified in terms of the significant structures that appear at different scales. This is, for instance, how Churchland and Sejnowski delineate levels of organization (1992). As they employ this idea, empirical research determines which structures are the significant ones, and not merely aggregates of lower level components. Hence, on their view, when a scientific consensus determines that a particular natural structure is important, that agreement indicates a level of organization.

The second option, interaction, is a way of characterizing levels of organization that has been developed by Wimsatt (1976, 2007). When interaction is used as a feature of levels of organization, levels are identified by the regular and predictable interactions that occur among certain entities. A collection of entities interacting with each other in regular and predictable ways—and in many cases depending on these interactions— constitutes a level of organization (1976, 239–42). So, for example, organisms like ourselves have relatively regular and predictable causal interactions with each other and other animals. These interactions indicate that there is a level of organization for organisms. At a smaller scale, the same holds for molecules. They interact with other molecules, and these interactions signify a level of organization—and likewise for subatomic particles, atoms, and cells, to name a few more. Regular and predictable interactions indicate a sub-atomic level, an atomic level, and a cellular level of organization.

Structure and interaction are each features that are useful for certain purposes. Here, because the goal is understanding the relationship between psychological capacities and neurobiological activities, levels of organization should identify activities, not just structures.5 Therefore, the levels of organization have to be based on regular and predictable interactions among entities. Doing so generates the following series of levels: a level of organization for organisms, a level for cells, one for molecules, and a level for atoms (figure 5). There are other levels on this hierarchy, but the cellular, molecular, and atomic levels of organization are the ones that fall within the scope of the brain. Importantly, the significant brain structures—the brain hemispheres, brain lobes, and functional brain areas—are not included in this hierarchy because they do not participate in causal interactions. Their parts, neurons, interact with each other, but these aggregates do not themselves interact, and so there is not a level of organization dedicated to any of them (for a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Johnson [2009]).（essay代写)

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