The reification objection to bottom-up cognitive ontology revision

Behav Brain Sci. 2016 Jan:39:e125. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X15001594.

Abstract

Anderson (2014) proposes a bottom-up approach to cognitive ontology revision: Neuroscientists should revise their taxonomies of cognitive constructs on the basis of brain activation patterns across many tasks. We argue that such bottom-up proposal is bound to commit a mistake of reification: It treats the abstract mathematical entities uncovered by dimension reduction techniques as if they were real psychological entities.

MeSH terms

  • Brain*
  • Cognition*
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical