Abstract

Certain thinkers in both psychiatry and philosophy contend that recent increases in our neuroscientific sophistication can and should lead to a decrease in our use of psychological explanations. The dissertation asks, how seriously should someone trained in psychological approaches take materialistic arguments which radically devalue psychology. ;The eliminative materialists in philosophy are antipsychological extremists whose devaluation of psychology is afflicted with philosophical inconsistencies and an ignorance of expert-level psychological theories. An important mistake they make is to confuse ontological questions with epistemological questions. A materialist answer to the mind-brain ontological question does not require a physicalistic epistemology. ;Eliminative materialists fail in their attempt to refute philosophical arguments which claim that having a subjective view provides us with information that we could not learn from studying neuroscience. Therapeutically oriented psychologists use subjective information all the time and, in doing so, understand people in a way that cannot be replaced by neuroscientific understanding. ;Biomedical psychiatrists claim that their approach is objective and scientific, but in practice they have to utilize subjective information. Examination of research in psychiatry indicates that psychology is a map for biomedical research; substrates have to be the substrate of some thing. Biomedical materialists who argue that all they need do is study the brain are philosophically naive. In examining problems which are typically considered to have biological components, it becomes evident that biomedical materialists ignore that the brain is an open system which has non-neurological influences. Biomedical materialists also claim that their point of view carries special humanitarian advantages, but in fact, it is neither inherently humane or inhumane. ;By adopting a narrow view of what counts as legitimate data, biomedical materialists try to make a Procrustean fit of human behavior into neuroscientific categories. Although it is psychologically convenient for materialists to focus only on the brain, it is not logically required by the brain-as-substrate thesis. Those trained in psychology should pay attention to the information provided by neuroscientific research, but they should not be persuaded by materialistic attempts to devalue psychology.