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Mental properties cannot be reduced to their realizing physical properties (because of multiple realizability), but there will be strict lawlike generalizations (the distinctive patterns) that purport to define mental properties in non-mental terms causal relations to non-mentally characterized inputs, outputs and other functional states.
Thus because of multiple realizability, reductionism violates a tenet of scientific methodology: seek to capture all capturable generalizations.
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But the arguments of Shapiro and other recent critics (see section 2 above) challenge the existence of multiple realizability only by assuming flat realization, and no recent critic has defended flat realization as the correct account involved in the scientific cases at issue.
Nevertheless, it opens the possibility to accommodate the threat of multiple realizability in a particular way: Functional kinds can be multiply realized, and, hence, they can be regarded as being distinct from the lower-level physical properties.
Associated with functionalism was the doctrine of multiple realizability: mental properties can, in practice as well as principle, be realized by a variety of media which do not share anything in common physically other than a capacity to support the distinctive pattern (Fodor 1974).
A more radical type of multiple realizability would obtain if a token physical (e.g., nervous) system can realize a single mental kind via distinct physical states of that same system at different times.
Carl Gillett and Ken Aizawa have been the most vocal recent defenders of multiple realizability.
Critics of functionalism were quick to turn its proclaimed virtue of multiple realizability against it.
So this type of multiple realizability is not by itself a barrier to reducibility.
This, however, is loosely based on considerations of multiple realizability that apply only to functional kinds, not to artifact kinds.
Do scientists always favor the second strategy, as recent philosophical critics of multiple realizability would seem to recommend?
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com