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1. Introduction
Long a topic of discussion among philosophers and scientists alike, there is growing
appreciation that understanding the complex relationship between neuroscience and
psychological science is of fundamental importance to achieving progress across these
scientific domains. Is the relationship between them one of complete autonomy or
independence—like two great ships passing in the night? Or is the relationship a
reductive one of total dependence—where one is subordinate to the other? Or perhaps
the correct picture is one of mutually beneficial interaction and integration—lying
somewhere in between these two extremes? One primary strategy for addressing this
issue, and one that occupies center stage in this volume, involves understanding
the nature of explanation in these different domains. Representative questions taken
up by various chapters in this volume include: Are the explanatory patterns employed
across these domains similar or different in kind? If their explanatory frameworks do
in fact differ, to what extent do they inform and constrain each other? And finally, how
shouldanswerstotheseandotherrelatedquestionsshapeourthinkingaboutthepros-
pects for integrating mind and brain science?
Several decades ago, during the heyday of computational cognitive psychology, the
prevailingviewwasthatthesciencesofthemindandbrainenjoyaconsiderabledegree
of independence or autonomy from one another—with respect to their theories, their
researchmethods,andthephenomenatheyelecttoinvestigate(e.g.,Fodor1974;Johnson-
Laird1983;Lachmanetal.1979;NewellandSimon1972;Pylyshyn1984;Simon1979).In
an expression of the mainstream perspective in the field at the time, the psychologist
Philip Johnson-Laird proposes that “[t]he mind can be studied independently from
the brain. Psychology (the study of the programs) can be pursued independently
from neurophysiology (the study of the machine code)” (Johnson-Laird 1983, 9).
1
Integrating Mind
and Brain Science
A Field Guide
David M. Kaplan](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-16-320.jpg)
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INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 7
law] mold made it continuous with the rest of science only at the price of making it
appeartrivialorsenseless”(Cummins1983,27).Intheirchapter,RothandCummins
identify one source of confusion underwriting views that attribute an explanatory
role to laws in psychological science. Building on previous work by Cummins (2000),
they indicate how the term “law” in psychology is often (confusingly) used by
researchers working in the field to refer to effects (i.e., robust patterns or regularities),
which are the targets of explanation rather than explanations in themselves. For
example, Fitts’ law describes but does not explain the widely observed tradeoff
between speed and accuracy in skilled human motor behavior. The Weber–Fechner
law describes but does not explain how the just-noticeable difference between two
stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli. Nevertheless, someone
might be tempted to try to read off the nomological character of psychological science
(and the explanatory role of psychological laws) from the mere appearance of the
word “law” in these instances. Yet these nominal laws, which simply describe effects
or phenomena to be explained, do not satisfy any of the standardly accepted criteria
for lawhood such as being exceptionless, having wide scope, etc., and are thus poorly
suited to play the required role in covering law explanation and theory reduction.
Roth and Cummins instead maintain that psychological laws are better understood
as capturing the explananda for psychological science rather than the explanans,
and argue that, appearances notwithstanding, psychological explanations do not
involve subsumption under laws. Their efforts to expose how the nomic character
of psychology is largely illusory places additional pressure on efforts to recruit the
covering law framework to shed light on the nature of psychological explanation
and reduction.
Another reason many participants in this debate see intertheoretic reduction as
a problematic way to achieve unification among the scientific disciplines is that
successful reduction renders the laws and theories of the higher-level (reduced) science
expendable in principle. Since all of the laws and all observational consequences of the
higher-level (reduced) theory can be derived directly from information contained in
the lower-level theory, the resulting picture is one in which the higher-level sciences
in principle provide no distinctive, non-redundant explanatory contribution over and
above that made by the lower-level science. As Fodor puts it, reductionism has “the
curious consequence that the more special sciences succeed, the more they ought to
disappear” (1974, 97). In practice, however, higher-level sciences might retain their
usefulness temporarily until the lower-level sciences become theoretically mature
enough to support the reductions on their own, or they might play heuristic roles such
asrevealingtheregularitiesorphenomenathatthelower-levelsciencesseektoexplain.
Hence, even hard-core reductionists such as John Bickle can admit that “psychological
causal explanations still play important heuristic roles in generating and testing
neurobiological hypotheses” (author’s emphasis; Bickle 2003, 178). But this picture
will
nevertheless appear deeply unsatisfying to those who seek to secure a long-term
explanatory role for psychological science. For these and other reasons, using theory](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-22-320.jpg)
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10 DAVID M. KAPLAN
If psychological capacities are akin to the functional capacities of computer software
in that they can be implemented in diverse physical substrates or hardware, then, in an
important sense, they are distinct from and irreducible to the neural mechanisms that
happen to realize them. For parallel reasons, psychological explanations making refer-
ence to psychological properties are likewise thought to be autonomous and distinct
from neurobiological explanations citing the neural properties that realize them.
Although this line of argument held sway in philosophy for some time, multiple
realizability-based arguments for the explanatory autonomy of psychology have been
vigorously challenged in recent decades. For example, critics maintain that the evi-
dence for multiple realization is substantially weaker than has been traditionally
assumed (Bickle 2003, 2006; Bechtel and Mundale 1999; Churchland 2005; Polger
2004, 2009; Shapiro 2000) or that the thesis of multiple realizability is consistent with
reductionism (Richardson 1979; Sober 1999), and so psychological explanations
either reduce to or ought to be replaced by neurobiological explanations.
In his chapter, Kenneth Aizawa enters into this debate and argues that multiple
realization is alive and well in the sciences of the mind and brain, albeit in a more
restricted form than many proponents of autonomy have previously endorsed.
Focusing on examples from vision science, he argues that when one attends to actual
scientific practice it becomes clear how evidence for different underlying neural
mechanisms (lower-level realizer properties) for a given psychological capacity (higher-
level realized properties) are not always handled in identical ways. Sometimes this
information is used to support multiple realizability claims. Other times it is not. More
specifically, Aizawa makes the case that scientists do not always adopt an “eliminate-
and-split” strategy according to which differences in the realizer properties result in
the elimination of the putative multiply realized higher-level property in favor of
two (or more) distinct higher-level psychological properties corresponding to the
different realizers. The role of the “eliminate-and-split” strategy has been the subject
of much philosophical discussion since Fodor (1974) first explicitly identified it as
a theoretical possibility:
[W]e could, if we liked, require the taxonomies of the special sciences to correspond to the
taxonomy of physics [or neuroscience] by insisting upon distinctions between the natural
kinds postulated by the former wherever they turn out to correspond to distinct natural kinds
in the latter. (Fodor 1974, 112)
If neuroscientists always applied this taxonomic strategy, multiple realizability would
be ruled out in principle since differences in how the realizer properties are taxono-
mizedwouldalwaysreflectdifferencesinhowtherealizedpropertiesaretaxonomized.
Clearly, this would undercut the prospects for an autonomous psychology. Aizawa
aims to show that this is not always the case; sometimes the higher-level taxonomy is
resilient in the face of discovered differences in lower-level realizers. Aizawa defends
the view that how discoveries about different lower-level realizers are treated depends
on specific features of the higher-level theory. In particular, sometimes higher-level](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-25-320.jpg)
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INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 11
psychological kinds are theorized in such a way as to permit a degree of individual
variation in underlying mechanisms; other times they are not. It is only in the latter
case that higher-level psychological kinds are eliminated and split in light of evidence
about different underlying mechanisms. In cases of the former, higher-level kinds are
retained in spite of such evidence.
Aizawa thus offers a more nuanced account of the role of multiple realizability
considerations in contemporary mind and brain science, and aims to show how a
piecemeal or partial but nonetheless genuine form of autonomy of higher-level
psychological kinds may be secured. This is not the sweeping autonomy that Fodor
envisioned, where the structural taxonomy of neuroscience never interacts, informs,
or otherwise constrains the functional taxonomy of psychology. Neither is it a
wholesale form of reduction where the higher-level kinds are slavishly dictated by the
taxonomic divisions established by the lower-level science. Instead, sometimes (but
not always) higher-level kinds are retained in spite of such divisions.
4. Functional and Computational Explanation
A somewhat different strategy for establishing the autonomy of psychology, which
does not directly rely on appeals to multiple realizability, involves identifying the dis-
tinctive kind (or kinds) of explanation constructed and used across these different
disciplines. The key idea here is that the discipline of psychology has its own explana-
tory patterns, which do not simply mimic those of another more fundamental
discipline and are not reducible to them. According to the general line of argument,
although the prevalent form of explanation in the neurosciences and other biological
sciences is mechanistic explanation (Bechtel 2008; Bechtel and Richardson 1993/2010;
Craver 2007; Machamer et al. 2000), the dominant form of explanation in psychology
is functional or computational explanation. Critically, the latter are not to be assimi-
lated to the former; they are distinct kinds of explanation.
4.1 Functional explanation
Itiswidelyassumedthattheprimary(althoughnotexclusive)explanandainpsychology
are sensory, motor, and cognitive capacities such as object recognition or working
memory (e.g., Von Eckardt 1995); and that psychologists explain these capacities
by providing a functional analysis (e.g., Cummins 1975, 1983; Fodor 1965, 1968).
Cummins defines functional analysis as follows: “Functional analysis consists in
analysing a disposition into a number of less problematic dispositions such that [the]
programmed manifestation of these analyzing dispositions amounts to a manifestation
of the analysed disposition” (Cummins 1983, 28). The central idea is that functional
analysis involves decomposing or breaking down a target capacity (or disposition) of a
system into a set of simpler sub-capacities and specifying how these are organized to
yield the capacity to be explained. Traditionally, functional analysis has been thought
to provide a distinct form of explanation from mechanistic explanation, the dominant](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-26-320.jpg)
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12 DAVID M. KAPLAN
mode of explanation employed in many lower-level sciences including neuroscience
(Cummins 1975, 1983; Fodor 1965, 1968). Call this the DISTINCTNESS thesis. As a
reminder, mechanistic explanations describe the organized assemblies of component
parts and activities responsible for maintaining, producing, or underlying the phe-
nomenon of interest (Bechtel 2008; Bechtel and Richardson 1993/2010; Craver 2007;
Machamer et al. 2000). Cummins expresses his commitment to DISTINCTNESS in
the following passages:
Form-function correlation is certainly absent in many cases, however, and it is therefore
important to keep functional analysis and componential [mechanistic] analysis conceptually
distinct. (1983, 29)
Since we do this sort of analysis [functional analysis] without reference to an instantiating system,
the analysis is evidently not an analysis of the instantiating system. (Cummins 1983, 29)
Fodor similarly embraces DISTINCTNESS when he states: “[V]is-à-vis explanations
of behavior, neurological theories specify mechanisms and psychological theories
do not” (1965, 177). Although DISTINCTNESS does not entail the autonomy of
psychology from neuroscience (call this the AUTONOMY thesis), often these
are defended together. Thus, Cummins embraces AUTONOMY when he claims:
“[T]his analysis [functional analysis] seems to put no constraints at all on [a given
system’s] componential analysis” (Cummins 1983, 30). Taken together, these claims
about DISTINCTNESS and AUTONOMY form what has been called the received
view about psychological explanation (Barrett 2014; Piccinini and Craver 2011).
In their chapter in this volume, Roth and Cummins further refine the influential
positionfirstdevelopedbyCummins(1983).Theyarguethataproperunderstandingof
functional analysis permits us to see how it provides a distinct and autonomous kind of
explanation that cannot be assimilated to that of mechanistic explanation, but which
nevertheless bears an evidential or confirmational relation to the description of under-
lying mechanisms. As an illustrative example, they describe a functional analysis of the
capacitytomultiplynumbersgivenintermsofthepartialproductsalgorithm.Thestep-
by-step algorithm specification provided by the functional analysis reveals little to no
information about the implementing mechanism, yet they argue that the analysis pro-
vided by the algorithm provides a complete explanation for the capacity in question.
According to the view Roth and Cummins defend, the functional analysis permits an
understanding of why any system possessing the capacity for computing the algorithm
ipso facto exhibits the specific regularities or patterns that constitute the phenomenon
to be explained. And this, they argue, is all that is being requested of the explanation.
Roth and Cummins acknowledge that information about lower-level implementa-
tion details can deepen our understanding of the systems whose capacities are targeted
by functional analyses. But they nevertheless stress that, strictly speaking, this infor-
mation should neither be interpreted as a proper part of the explanation nor as a
requirement on adequate functional explanation. In their words, “having a fuller
understanding of a system, in this sense, is not the same thing as having a more](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-27-320.jpg)
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INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 13
complete explanation of the [capacity] targeted for functional analysis.” “(Roth and
Cummins,thisvolume,37).RothandCummins instead suggest that there is a crucial
distinction between explaining a capacity via functional analysis (what they call
horizontal explanation) and explaining how a functional analysis is implemented
(what they call vertical explanation)—a distinction which, in their opinion, has
been repeatedly elided or conflated in the literature. In other words, functional
explanation is not mechanistic explanation.
While evidence from neuroscience is relevant to determining which functional ana-
lysis is correct, they argue that the specific role that details about underlying neural
mechanisms plays is one of confirmation not explanation. As they put it, “bringing such
knowledge to bear in this instance would be an exercise in confirming a proposed ana-
lysis, not explaining a capacity.” “(Roth and Cummins, this volume, 39). Their discussion
provides an important clarification of the original, highly influential position first
articulated by Cummins (1983). The chapter also raises the stakes in the current debate,
since it stands diametrically opposed to recent attempts by proponents of the mechan-
istic perspective to identify functional analyses as elliptical or incomplete mechanistic
explanations (Piccinini and Craver 2011). This view will be taken up in detail below.
Along similar lines, in his chapter, Daniel Weiskopf argues that psychological models
can be explanatorily adequate in the sense that they satisfy standardly accepted norms
of good explanation such as providing the ability to answer a range of counterfactual
questions regarding the target phenomenon and the ability to manipulate and control
the target phenomenon, without necessarily being mechanistic. A cognitive model
(sometimesalsoreferredtoasa“box-and-arrow”model;seeDatteriandLaudisa2014)
involves a set of functionally interacting components each of which is characterized
on the basis of its functional profile (and typically couched in representational or
information-processing terms). According to Weiskopf, cognitive models can provide
perfectly legitimate causal explanations of psychological capacities by describing the
way information is represented and processed. Although these models evidently
describe real causal structure, they do not embody determinate commitments about
the neural mechanisms or structures underlying these capacities. They do not provide
a specifiable decomposition of the target system into spatially localizable physical
parts, and critically, these mechanistic details do not need to be filled in for the model
to be endowed with explanatory force. Consequently, on Weiskopf’s view, psychological
explanation is fundamentally different in kind to mechanistic explanation.
4.2 Computational explanation
Along closely related lines, others have argued that computational explanations of
psychological capacities are different in character from the mechanistic explanations
found in neuroscience and other life sciences. Sejnowski, Koch, and Churchland (1988)
express one primary motivation for this view:
Mechanical and causal explanations of chemical and electrical signals in the brain are different
from computational explanations. The chief difference is that a computational explanation](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-28-320.jpg)
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INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 15
definedmathematicalfunction.Thisisaparadigmaticfunction-theoreticexplanation—
because it provides a mathematically precise specification of what the early
visual
systemdoesandanadequateexplanationofhowitdoesit.AccordingtoEgan,function-
theoretic characterizations can possess explanatory import even in the absence of
detailsabouthowsuchcomputationsareimplementedinneuralsystems.Consequently,
they are not properly interpreted as mechanistic explanations.
Views about autonomous computational explanation are often backed up by
appeals to David Marr’s influential tri-level computational framework. According to
Marr (1982), there are three distinct levels of analysis that apply to all information-
processing systems ranging from digital computers to the brain: the computational
level (a specification of what function is being computed and why it is computed),
the algorithmic level (a specification of the representations and computational
transformations defined over those representations), and the implementation level
(a specification of how the other levels are physically realized). Marr’s discussion of
the relationships between these levels appears to reinforce the idea of an autonomous
levelofcomputationalexplanation.First,herepeatedlyprioritizestherelativeimportance
of the computational level:
[I]t is the top level, the level of computational theory, which is critically important from
the information-processing point of view. The reason for this is that the nature of the
computations . . . depends more upon the computational problems to be solved than upon
the particular hardware in which their solutions are implemented. (Marr 1982, 27)
This privileging of the computational level, coupled with the fact that his preferred
methodology is top-down, moving from the computational level to the algorithmic,
and ultimately, to implementation, has fostered the idea of an autonomous level of
computationalexplanation.Second,insomepassages,Marrappearstoclaimthatthere
areeithernodirectconstraintsbetweenlevelsorthattheoperativeconstraintsarerela-
tively weak and only flow downward from the computational level—claims that are
clearly at odds with the mechanistic view. For instance, he states that: “since the three
levels are only rather loosely related, some phenomena may be explained at only one or
two of them” (1982, 25). If computational explanations were unconstrained by one
another in this manner, this could certainly be used to draw a conclusion about an
explanatorily autonomous level.
Nevertheless, there are numerous places where Marr sounds much more mechanis-
tic in his tone (for further discussion, see Kaplan 2011). Although his general compu-
tational framework clearly emphasizes how one and the same computation might in
principle be performed by a wide array of distinct algorithms and implemented in a
broad range of physical systems, when the focus is on explaining a particular cogni-
tive capacity such as human vision, Marr appears to strongly reject the claim that any
computationally adequate algorithm (i.e., one that has the same input–output profile
or computes the same function) can provide an equally appropriate explanation of
how the computation is performed in that particular system. After outlining their](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-30-320.jpg)
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18 DAVID M. KAPLAN
mechanism is often essential to producing the phenomenon to be explained.
According to Bechtel, “[m]odes of organization are not determined by the compo-
nents but are imposed on them” (Bechtel 2007, 192). Furthermore, successful
mechanistic explanations sometimes go beyond describing the local mechanism and
its underlying components because they appeal to conditions of the broader system
or environment in which the mechanism is embedded and without which they could
not perform their functions (Bechtel 2008). This too has been argued to secure the
autonomy of higher levels of organization and explanation that do not directly
depend on multiple realizability.
Relatedly, the mechanistic framework embodies a distinctive account of levels of
organization in mechanisms, which in turn affords a more modest view of reduction
than the traditional theory reduction model. Whereas the traditional approach
assumes that higher-level theories can be reduced in succession to increasingly lower
levels until some fundamental level is reached, which in turn grounds all the higher
levels, the mechanistic approach rejects this global account of reduction. Although
mechanistic explanations are reductionist in the sense that they appeal to lower-level
parts and their operations to explain some higher-level behavior of the mechanism,
the reductions supported have a local character since there is no single fundamental
level that globally grounds all higher levels of mechanisms. In stark contrast to
traditional approaches that construe levels as global strata spanning the natural world
(Oppenheim and Putnam 1958), levels of organization in mechanisms are local in the
sense that they are defined relative to a given mechanism (Bechtel 2008; Craver 2007).
In a particular mechanistic context, two arbitrary elements are deemed to reside at the
same mechanistic level only if they are components in the same mechanism, and they
occupy a higher or lower level depending on how they figure into a componential or
part-whole relation within a mechanism. Critically, questions concerning whether
components of a given mechanism (or the mechanism as a whole) reside at a higher,
lower, or the same level as entities outside the mechanism are not well defined (Bechtel
2008; Craver 2007).
5.2 Functional analysis as elliptical mechanistic explanation
Along somewhat different lines, Piccinini and Craver (2011) maintain that the
mechanistic perspective encourages a rethinking of the received view of psychological
explanation as a kind of functional analysis or functional explanation (e.g., Cummins,
1975, 1983, 2000; Fodor 1968), which eliminates all commitments to autonomy.
Piccinini and Craver (2011) reject the received view and instead argue that functional
and mechanistic explanations are neither distinct nor autonomous from one another
precisely because functional analysis, when properly constrained, provides a kind of
mechanistic explanation—partial or elliptical mechanistic explanation.1
Mechanistic
1
Arguably, a precursor of this view was articulated and defended much earlier by Bechtel and
Richardson (1993/2010). In that work, they repeatedly emphasize how both functional and structural](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-33-320.jpg)
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22 DAVID M. KAPLAN
The interventionist approach stands to legitimize higher-level explanations in two
ways. First, it opens up the possibility that sometimes relatively abstract, higher-level
explanations can provide better explanations than more detailed, lower-level ones.
This is because the lower-level ones might include irrelevant or inessential details
whose variations or changes make no difference to the target phenomenon and thus
serve to obscure the difference-making factors. Second, this particular way of thinking
about causal relationships opens the door to higher-level causal explanations since
higher-level factors such as attentional load, memory capacity, or general psychological
state can in principle serve equally well as the targets of such interventions as lower-
levelneurobiologicalormolecularfactors.Hence,theinterventionistframeworkholds
promise to illuminate the causal and explanatory relevance of high-level factors, and
in doing so legitimize high-level, relatively abstract explanations found throughout
psychology and neuroscience.2
In his chapter, Woodward focuses on relatively abstract neurobiological models
suchasconductancemodelsandeventheHodgkin-Huxleymodeloftheactionpoten-
tial, whose explanatory credentials have been subject to intense debate in the recent
philosophical literature (e.g., Bogen 2005, 2008; Craver 2006, 2007, 2008; Kaplan 2011;
Levy 2014; Levy and Bechtel 2013; Schaffner 2008; Weber 2008). Woodward’s general
conclusion here is that the interventionist framework can be used to illuminate how
models in neurobiology and psychology that abstract away from certain lower-level
implementational details can nonetheless be explanatory. If successful, this secures a
kind of partial autonomy of higher-level explanations and models from lower-level
mechanistic details.
Woodward argues that higher-level psychological models need not be seen as auto-
matically competing with lower-level neurobiological models. Whether the higher- or
lower-level model is most appropriate, or provides a superior explanation, depends on
the phenomenon one is trying to explain. Sometimes lower-level details about neural
implementation will be causally relevant and so must be incorporated into the model if
it is to be explanatorily adequate. Other times such details will be irrelevant to (make
no difference for) the phenomenon of interest, and so can be safely ignored in one’s
model without affecting its explanatory power. Woodward finds that modeling
practices in psychology and neuroscience are often exquisitely sensitive to the goal of
trying to include just enough detail to account for what one is trying to explain but no
more.Thismessagedovetailsnicelywithviewscommonlyexpressedbycomputational
modelers who are continually trying to find the appropriate balance of detail and
abstraction in their models so as to best account for the phenomenon of interest. For
example, the computational neuroscientist Trappenberg (2010) asserts that “[m]odels
are intended to simplify experimental data, and thereby to identify which details of the
biology are essential to explain particular aspects of a system” (2010, 6). He is triangu-
lating on the idea that simpler, relatively abstract models can often provide superior
2
Woodward (2008, 2010) explores similar questions in the contexts of psychiatry and biology.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3487350-250621164530-b6a75c99/85/Explanation-And-Integration-In-Mind-And-Brain-Science-1st-Edition-David-M-Kaplan-37-320.jpg)
Explanation And Integration In Mind And Brain Science 1st Edition David M Kaplan
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- 6. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi Explanation and Integration in Mind and Brain Science
- 7. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi
- 8. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi Explanation and Integration in Mind and Brain Science edited by David M. Kaplan 1
- 9. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2017 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956292 ISBN 978–0–19–968550–9 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
- 10. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi Contents List of Figures vii List of Contributors ix 1. Integrating Mind and Brain Science: A Field Guide 1 David M. Kaplan 2. Neuroscience, Psychology, Reduction, and Functional Analysis 29 Martin Roth and Robert Cummins 3. The Explanatory Autonomy of Cognitive Models 44 Daniel A. Weiskopf 4. Explanation in Neurobiology: An Interventionist Perspective 70 James Woodward 5. The Whole Story: Explanatory Autonomy and Convergent Evolution 101 Michael Strevens 6. Brains and Beliefs: On the Scientific Integration of Folk Psychology 119 Dominic Murphy 7. Function-Theoretic Explanation and the Search for Neural Mechanisms 145 Frances Egan 8. Neural Computation, Multiple Realizability, and the Prospects for Mechanistic Explanation 164 David M. Kaplan 9. Marr’s Computational Level and Delineating Phenomena 190 Oron Shagrir and William Bechtel 10. Multiple Realization, Autonomy, and Integration 215 Kenneth Aizawa 11. A Unified Mechanistic Account of Teleological Functions for Psychology and Neuroscience 236 Corey J. Maley and Gualtiero Piccinini Index 257
- 11. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi
- 12. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi List of Figures 2.1 Reduction hierarchy 31 3.1 Baddeley’s model of working memory 48 4.1 The Hodgkin–Huxley model 95 5.1 Golden mole; marsupial mole 107 7.1 An adder 151 7.2 A state-space portrait for the eye-position memory network 153 8.1 Example of cross-orientation suppression in V1 neurons 170 8.2 Sound localization in birds and mammals 174 8.3 Neural computation of interaural time differences (ITDs) in birds and mammals 176 9.1 Marr’s portrayal of the ambiguity in matching elements to determine the depth of an object 198 9.2 Edge detection 203 10.1 Signal ambiguity with a single type of cone 230 10.2 Signal disambiguation in a system with three types of cone 230
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- 14. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi List of Contributors Kenneth Aizawa, Rutgers University William Bechtel, University of California, San Diego Robert Cummins, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Frances Egan, Rutgers University David M. Kaplan, Macquarie University Corey J. Maley, University of Kansas Dominic Murphy, University of Sydney Gualtiero Piccinini, University of Missouri, St Louis Martin Roth, Drake University Oron Shagrir, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Michael Strevens, New York University Daniel A. Weiskopf, Georgia State University James Woodward, University of Pittsburgh
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- 16. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 1. Introduction Long a topic of discussion among philosophers and scientists alike, there is growing appreciation that understanding the complex relationship between neuroscience and psychological science is of fundamental importance to achieving progress across these scientific domains. Is the relationship between them one of complete autonomy or independence—like two great ships passing in the night? Or is the relationship a reductive one of total dependence—where one is subordinate to the other? Or perhaps the correct picture is one of mutually beneficial interaction and integration—lying somewhere in between these two extremes? One primary strategy for addressing this issue, and one that occupies center stage in this volume, involves understanding the nature of explanation in these different domains. Representative questions taken up by various chapters in this volume include: Are the explanatory patterns employed across these domains similar or different in kind? If their explanatory frameworks do in fact differ, to what extent do they inform and constrain each other? And finally, how shouldanswerstotheseandotherrelatedquestionsshapeourthinkingaboutthepros- pects for integrating mind and brain science? Several decades ago, during the heyday of computational cognitive psychology, the prevailingviewwasthatthesciencesofthemindandbrainenjoyaconsiderabledegree of independence or autonomy from one another—with respect to their theories, their researchmethods,andthephenomenatheyelecttoinvestigate(e.g.,Fodor1974;Johnson- Laird1983;Lachmanetal.1979;NewellandSimon1972;Pylyshyn1984;Simon1979).In an expression of the mainstream perspective in the field at the time, the psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird proposes that “[t]he mind can be studied independently from the brain. Psychology (the study of the programs) can be pursued independently from neurophysiology (the study of the machine code)” (Johnson-Laird 1983, 9). 1 Integrating Mind and Brain Science A Field Guide David M. Kaplan
- 17. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 2 DAVID M. KAPLAN In the intervening decades, the doctrine of disciplinary autonomy has fallen on hard times. Today, it is far from being the universally held or even dominant view. In fact, given the emergence of cognitive neuroscience as a new scientific field formed precisely at the interface between these disciplines, one might reasonably wonder whether the consensushasnowshiftedinexactlytheoppositedirection—towardsaviewofcomplete disciplinary integration and interdependence rather than autonomy. In the inaugural issueoftheJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, theneditor Michael Gazzaniga writes: In the past 10 years, there have been many developments in sciences concerned with the study of mind. Perhaps the most noteworthy is the gradual realization that the sub-disciplines committed to the effort such as cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science and philosophy should not exist alone and that each has much to gain by interacting. Those cognitive scientists interested in a deeper understanding of how the human mind works now believe that it is maximally fruitful to propose models of cognitive processes that can be assessed in neurobiologic terms. Likewise, it is no longer useful for neuroscientists to propose brain mechanisms underlying psychological processes without actually coming to grips with the complexities of psychological processes involved in any particular mental capacity being examined. (Gazzaniga 1989, 2) From the outset, contributors to the cognitive neuroscience movement have explicitly recognized the interdisciplinary and integrative nature of the field, which is unified by the common goal of trying to decipher how the mind and brain work (Boone and Piccinini 2016; Churchland and Sejnowski 1988). Despite the rapidly growing influ- enceofcognitiveneuroscienceandcognatefieldssuchascomputationalneuroscience, some researchers continue to maintain that neuroscience is largely or completely irrelevanttounderstandingcognition(e.g.,Fodor1997;GallistelandKing2009).Others maintain that psychology is (or ought to be) a tightly integrated part of the broader scientific enterprise to discover and elucidate the multi-level mechanisms underlying mind and cognition (e.g., Boone and Piccinini 2016; Piccinini and Craver 2011). Hence, the debate over an autonomous psychology remains incompletely settled. The objective of this chapter is to provide a field guide to some of the key issues that have shaped and continue to influence the debate about explanation and integration across the mind and brain sciences. Along the way, many of the central proposals defended in the individual chapters will be introduced and important similarities and differences between them will be highlighted. Since questions on this topic have a long trackrecordofphilosophicalandscientificengagement,providingsomeofthebroader historical and theoretical context will facilitate a deeper appreciation of the contribu- tions each individual chapter makes to these important and ongoing debates. 2. Autonomy and Distinctness: Some Provisional Definitions It is frequently claimed that psychology is autonomous and distinct from neuroscience and other lower-level sciences. But what exactly do these terms mean? Before proceeding
- 18. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 3 it will prove useful to have working definitions of these key concepts, which recur throughout this introductory chapter as well as the volume more generally. First, consider the notion of autonomy. Generally speaking, autonomy implies independence from external influence, control, or constraint. The Tibet Autonomous Region is, at least according to the Chinese Government, appropriately so called because it is free of direct external control from Beijing. Autonomous robotic vehicles are appropriately so called because they are capable of sensing and navigat- ing in their environments without reliance on direct human input or control. In a similar manner, scientific disciplines may also be autonomous from one another. Following Piccinini and Craver (2011), we might provisionally define one discip- line as being autonomous from another when at least one of the following conditions is satisfied: (a) they can independently select which phenomenon to investigate, (b) they can independently select which methods to use, (c) they can independently select which theoretical vocabulary to apply, (d) the laws/theories/explanations from one discipline are not reducible to the laws/theories/explanations of the other discipline, or (e) evidence from one discipline does not exert any direct constraints on the laws/ theories/explanations of the other discipline. Importantly, this characterization of autonomy is flexible and admits of degrees. A scientific discipline can in principle completely or partially satisfy one or more of these conditions (a–e), and consequently can be completely or partially autonomous with respect to another discipline. At one extreme, a discipline may only incompletely or partially satisfy a single condition, comprising a minimal form of autonomy. At the other extreme, a discipline may completely satisfy all conditions, instantiating a maximal form of autonomy (at least with respect to identified conditions a–e). The notion of distinctness is closely related, but logically weaker. Disciplines exhibit distinctness if they investigate different kinds of phenomena, use different kinds of methods, or construct different kinds of explanations. The last of these is most relevant in the context of the present volume. As we will see, the thesis of the explanatory dis- tinctnessofneuroscienceandpsychology—roughly,thattheyemploycharacteristically different kinds of explanation—is a key premise in a number of recent arguments for the autonomy of psychology. It is important to distinguish between autonomy and distinctness because one can obtain without the other. Generally speaking, distinctness is a necessary but insufficient condition for autonomy (for additional discussion, see Piccinini and Craver 2011). Without distinctness there is clearly no scope for autonomy. If two disciplines investi- gatethesamephenomena,inanimportantsense,theycannotindependentlyselectwhich phenomenon to investigate. They are instead constrained or bound to investigate the same phenomena. Similarly, if two disciplines employ the same methods or theoretical vocabularies, in an important sense, they cannot independently select which methods
- 19. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 4 DAVID M. KAPLAN or theoretical vocabularies to use. They are bound to use the same across the disciplines. Although distinctness is required for autonomy, it does not entail it. Two or more things can be distinct yet be mutually dependent or interdependent. Consider a simple example. The Earth is distinct from the Sun, yet these systems influence one another in a multitude of ways (e.g., gravitationally and thermodynamically). They are distinct, but not autonomous in any interesting sense of the word. Similarly, a scientific field or discipline may have its own distinct laws, principles, and theories, yet these may turn out to be reducible to or evidentially constrained by those of another discipline. Even though distinctness does not entail autonomy, as will be discussed shortly, they are often endorsed as a package deal. 3. Reduction or Autonomy? A Debate Oscillating between Two Extremes Philosophers weighing in on this topic have tended to focus on the prospects of either (a) achieving integration or unification of psychology and neuroscience via theory reduction, or (b) securing the autonomy of psychology and establishing in principle its irreducibility to neuroscience via multiple realizability. Despite its historical prevalence, one obvious problem with this way of carrying out the debate is that it assumes a binary opposition between two extreme positions—either psychological science reduces to or is completely autonomous from neuroscience. According to the traditional picture, the proposed relationship between psychology and neuroscience is either one of complete dependence (reduction) or complete independence (auton- omy). There is no stable middle ground. Many recent contributors to the debate reject this strong binary assumption and instead recognize that there is a continuum of plausible positions lying in between these two extremes. These intermediate positions involve some kind of relationship of partial dependence or partial constraint. A major objective of this volume is to focus attention on some of these “middle ground” posi- tions that have been staked out in the debate and highlight their associated prospects and problems. Before considering these intermediates, however, it will be useful to take a closer look at the extremes. 3.1 Theory reduction Many of the dominant ideas concerning the relationship between the mind and brain sciences have emerged from traditional philosophical perspectives concerning explanation and reduction. No view is more influential in this regard than the cover- ing law account of explanation. According to the covering law account, explaining some event or phenomenon involves showing how to derive it in a logical argument (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948). More specifically, a scientific explanation should be expressible as a logical argument in which the explanandum-phenomenon (that which is being explained) appears as the conclusion of the argument and the explanans
- 20. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 5 (that which does the explaining) appears as the premise set, which includes statements characterizing the relevant empirical conditions under which the phenomenon obtains (initial conditions) and at least one general law required for the derivation of the explanandum. According to the view, good scientific explanations are those in which the explanans provides strong or conclusive evidential grounds for expecting the explanandum-phenomenon to occur (Hempel 1965). In its most general formulation, the covering law account is intended to apply uniformly to the explanation of spatiotemporally restricted events such as the explo- sion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, as well as the explanation of general regularities or laws such as the explanation of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion in terms of more basic laws of Newtonian mechanics. A derivation of one or more sets of laws (com- prising a theory) from another set of laws (comprising another theory) is known as an intertheoretic reduction. According to the covering law account, intertheoretic reduction comprises a special case of deductive-nomological explanation. Nagel (1961) developed these ideas into an explicit model of theory reduction, pro- posing that a theory (or law) from a higher-level science such as psychology can be reduced to, and thereby explained by, a theory (or law) from a lower-level science such as neuroscience or biology just in case (a suitably axiomatized version of) the higher-level theory can be logically derived from (a suitably axiomatized version of) the lower-level theory. Since the terminology employed in both the reduced and reducing theories will invariably differ in some way, so-called bridge principles or rules of correspondence are required to establish links between the terms of the two theories. For example, a bridge principle might connect terms from thermodynamics such as “heat” with those of statistical mechanics such as “mean molecular energy.” Finally, because the reduced theory will typically only apply over a restricted part of the domain of the reducing theory or at certain limits, boundary conditions that set the appropriate range for the reduction are often required in order for the derivation to be successful. The theory reduction model can be represented schematically as follows (Bechtel 2008, 131): Lower-level laws (in the basic, reducing science) Bridge principles Boundary conditions _______________________________ ∴ Higher-level laws (in the secondary, reduced science). Oppenheim and Putnam (1958) famously argue that the Logical Positivists’ grand vision of scientific unification can finally be achieved, at least in principle, by reveal- ing the derivability relationships between the theories of the sciences. They start by assuming that each scientific discipline occupies a different level within a single global hierarchy. The Oppenheim–Putnam framework then involves an iterated sequence of reductions (so-called micro-reductions) starting with the reduction of some higher-level theory to the next lowest-level theory, which in turn is reduced to
- 21. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 6 DAVID M. KAPLAN the next lowest-level theory, and so on, until the level of fundamental physical theory is eventually reached. As Fodor succinctly puts it: “all true theories in the special sci- ences should reduce to physical theories in the long run” (1974, 97). Oppenheim and Putnam’s general framework entails a specific conception of how psychology will eventually reduce to neuroscience and beyond: It is not absurd to suppose that psychological laws will eventually be explained in terms of the behavior or individual neurons in the brain; that the behavior of individual cells—including neurons—may eventually be explained in terms of their biochemical constitution; and that the behavior of molecules—including the macro-molecules that make up living cells—may even- tually be explained in terms of atomic physics. If this is achieved, then psychological laws will have, in principle, been reduced to laws of atomic physics. (Oppenheim and Putnam 1958, 7) Although many philosophers once held out high hopes for reductive successes of this kind, few are so optimistic today. The theory reduction account faces challenges along several fronts including those raised about its adequacy as a general account of the relations between the sciences and as a specific account of the relation between neuro- science and psychology. Its descriptive adequacy as a general account of reduction in science has been called into question as it has proved exceedingly difficult to locate real examples that satisfy the account even in domains thought to be paradigmatic such as physics (e.g., Sklar 1967). Other general issues concern its oversimplified or otherwise inaccurate portrayal of the relationships between the various sciences including the relationships between the theories, concepts, and explanandum phenomena of those sciences (e.g., Bickle 1998; Churchland 1989; Feyerabend 1962; Schaffner 1967, 1969; Wimsatt 2007). Yet, it is the specific challenges that stand out as most relevant for present purposes. One primary reason for heightened skepticism about theory reduction as an adequate account of the specific relationship between neuroscience and psychology is the conspicuous absence of laws or lawlike generalizations in these sciences. This is what Rosenberg (2001), in the context of biology, aptly refers to as the “nomological vac- uum.” Since unification is supposed to be achieved by deriving the laws of psychology from the laws of neuroscience (or some other lower-level science such as biophysics), clearly a precondition for such unification is the availability of laws at both the level of reduced and reducing theories. If the theoretical knowledge of a given discipline can- not be specified in terms of a set of laws (an assumption that mechanists and others reject),thereissimplynoscopeforunificationalongtheselines.Yet,despitedecadesof effort to identify genuine lawful generalizations in psychology or neuroscience of the sort one finds in other scientific disciplines such as physics, few if any candidate laws have been revealed. In their chapter, Martin Roth and Robert Cummins echo similar criticisms about the “nomicconceptionofscience”attheheartofthecoveringlawframework.AsCummins puts it in his earlier and highly influential work on the nature of psychological explanation: “Forcing psychological explanation into the subsumptivist [covering
- 22. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 7 law] mold made it continuous with the rest of science only at the price of making it appeartrivialorsenseless”(Cummins1983,27).Intheirchapter,RothandCummins identify one source of confusion underwriting views that attribute an explanatory role to laws in psychological science. Building on previous work by Cummins (2000), they indicate how the term “law” in psychology is often (confusingly) used by researchers working in the field to refer to effects (i.e., robust patterns or regularities), which are the targets of explanation rather than explanations in themselves. For example, Fitts’ law describes but does not explain the widely observed tradeoff between speed and accuracy in skilled human motor behavior. The Weber–Fechner law describes but does not explain how the just-noticeable difference between two stimuli is proportional to the magnitude of the stimuli. Nevertheless, someone might be tempted to try to read off the nomological character of psychological science (and the explanatory role of psychological laws) from the mere appearance of the word “law” in these instances. Yet these nominal laws, which simply describe effects or phenomena to be explained, do not satisfy any of the standardly accepted criteria for lawhood such as being exceptionless, having wide scope, etc., and are thus poorly suited to play the required role in covering law explanation and theory reduction. Roth and Cummins instead maintain that psychological laws are better understood as capturing the explananda for psychological science rather than the explanans, and argue that, appearances notwithstanding, psychological explanations do not involve subsumption under laws. Their efforts to expose how the nomic character of psychology is largely illusory places additional pressure on efforts to recruit the covering law framework to shed light on the nature of psychological explanation and reduction. Another reason many participants in this debate see intertheoretic reduction as a problematic way to achieve unification among the scientific disciplines is that successful reduction renders the laws and theories of the higher-level (reduced) science expendable in principle. Since all of the laws and all observational consequences of the higher-level (reduced) theory can be derived directly from information contained in the lower-level theory, the resulting picture is one in which the higher-level sciences in principle provide no distinctive, non-redundant explanatory contribution over and above that made by the lower-level science. As Fodor puts it, reductionism has “the curious consequence that the more special sciences succeed, the more they ought to disappear” (1974, 97). In practice, however, higher-level sciences might retain their usefulness temporarily until the lower-level sciences become theoretically mature enough to support the reductions on their own, or they might play heuristic roles such asrevealingtheregularitiesorphenomenathatthelower-levelsciencesseektoexplain. Hence, even hard-core reductionists such as John Bickle can admit that “psychological causal explanations still play important heuristic roles in generating and testing neurobiological hypotheses” (author’s emphasis; Bickle 2003, 178). But this picture will nevertheless appear deeply unsatisfying to those who seek to secure a long-term explanatory role for psychological science. For these and other reasons, using theory
- 23. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 8 DAVID M. KAPLAN reduction as the basis for an account of the relationship between psychology and neuroscience has appeared unpromising to many. The traditional theory reduction framework thus offers one potential strategy for unifying or integrating psychological and brain science, but one that is fraught with problems. The well-known considerations rehearsed above indicate that the pros- pects for achieving unification by reduction are either extremely dim due to the lack of explanatory laws in psychology and neuroscience, or else reduction can succeed but in doing so would impose unbearably heavy costs by rendering psychology explanatorily inert and obsolete. Neither of these paths appears particularly promis- ing. This has consequently inspired a search for alternative ways of characterizing the relationship between the sciences of the mind and the brain that do not bottom out in theory reduction, including those that manage to secure some degree of autonomy for psychology. Before moving on, it is worth pausing briefly to describe another reductionist account—importantly distinct from the theory reduction account—that has received considerable attention in recent decades. This is the “ruthless reductionism” account advocated primarily by John Bickle (2003, 2006). Bickle’s account rejects a number of core assumptions of the theory reduction view including that laws are central to reduc- tion, and that successful reductions of the concepts and kinds posited by higher-level theories to those of some basic lower-level theory proceeds via a sequence of step-wise reductions.Accordingtoruthlessreductionism,reductionscaninsteadbe“direct”(i.e., without any intermediate steps) such as the “reductions of psychological concepts and kinds to molecular-biological mechanisms and pathways” (Bickle 2006, 412). Bickle argues that researchers in lower-level neuroscience such as cellular and molecular neuroscience accomplish these direct reductions by experimentally intervening at the cellular or molecular level and producing detectable effects at the level of the phenom- enon to be explained (the behavioral or psychological level). Accordingly, there is a path for reduction that skips over any intermediary levels. Despite its role in the broader debate, ruthless reductionism exhibits many similar problems to traditional theory reduction accounts. In particular, it treats higher-level explanations in psychology (and even higher-level fields within neuroscience includ- ing cognitive neuroscience and systems neuroscience) as expendable in principle, and therefore fails to secure a permanent role for explanations developed at these higher levels. It therefore fails to exemplify the type of “middle ground” integrative views about the relationship between psychology and neuroscience emphasized in this volume. 3.2 Autonomy and multiple realizability Another traditional response that philosophers have given is to argue that psychology exhibits a similar kind of autonomy with respect to “lower-level” sciences such as neuroscience in the sense that their theories or explanations are unconstrained by evidence about neural implementation.
- 24. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 9 Many early defenses of the autonomy of psychology and other higher-level sciences involved appeals to multiple realizability in order to deny the possibility of reducing the theories or laws of the higher-level science to those of the lower-level science (e.g., Fodor 1974, 1997; Putnam 1975). These views emerged as direct responses to the traditional theory reduction model and its negative implications for the independent status of psychology and the rest of the special sciences. Recall that according to the classical theory reduction model, successful intertheo- retic reduction requires a specification of appropriate bridge principles and boundary conditions (Nagel 1961). Bridge principles establish systematic mappings or identities between the terms of the two theories, and are essential for the reduction to go through. Anti-reductionists therefore naturally gravitate towards these bridge principles in their attacks, claiming that bridge principles will generally be unavailable given that the eventspickedoutbyspecialsciencepredicatesorterms(e.g.,functionallydefinedterms such as “money” or “pain”) will be “wildly disjunctive” from the perspective of lower- level sciences such as physics (Fodor 1974, 103). In other words, the enterprise to build bridge principles connecting the vocabularies or predicates of the higher- and lower- level sciences in an orderly, one-to-one manner breaks down because higher-level phe- nomena are often multiply realized by heterogeneous sets of lower-level realizers. Put somewhat differently, multiple realizability entails that the predicates of some higher- level science will cross-classify phenomena picked out by predicates from a lower-level science. The one-to-many mapping from the psychological to the neurobiological (or physical) implied by multiple realizability renders the bridge principle building enter- priseattheheartofthetheoryreductionmodelanon-starter.Sincetheestablishmentof bridge principles is a necessary condition for classical intertheoretic reduction, multiple realizability directly implies the irreducibility and autonomy of psychology. This line of argument has connections to functionalist and computationalist views in the philosophy of mind, which also depend on a notion of multiple realizability. According to one influential version of computationalism, cognition is identified with digitalcomputationoversymbolicrepresentations(NewellandSimon1976;Anderson 1996; Johnson-Laird 1983; Pylyshyn 1984). Proponents of computationalism have long maintained that psychology can accomplish its explanatory objectives without reliance on evidence from neuroscience about underlying neural mechanisms. Multiple realizability is taken to justify a theoretically principled neglect of neurosci- entific data based on the alleged close analogy between psychological processes and running software (e.g., executing programs) on a digital computer, and the multiple realizability of the former on the latter. According to the analogy, the brain merely pro- vides the particular hardware on which the cognitive programs (e.g., software) happen to run, but the same software could in principle be implemented in indefinitely many other hardware platforms. For this reason, the brain is deemed a mere implementation of the software. If the goal is to understand the functional organization of the software—the computations being performed—determining the hardware details is a relatively unimportant step.
- 25. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 10 DAVID M. KAPLAN If psychological capacities are akin to the functional capacities of computer software in that they can be implemented in diverse physical substrates or hardware, then, in an important sense, they are distinct from and irreducible to the neural mechanisms that happen to realize them. For parallel reasons, psychological explanations making refer- ence to psychological properties are likewise thought to be autonomous and distinct from neurobiological explanations citing the neural properties that realize them. Although this line of argument held sway in philosophy for some time, multiple realizability-based arguments for the explanatory autonomy of psychology have been vigorously challenged in recent decades. For example, critics maintain that the evi- dence for multiple realization is substantially weaker than has been traditionally assumed (Bickle 2003, 2006; Bechtel and Mundale 1999; Churchland 2005; Polger 2004, 2009; Shapiro 2000) or that the thesis of multiple realizability is consistent with reductionism (Richardson 1979; Sober 1999), and so psychological explanations either reduce to or ought to be replaced by neurobiological explanations. In his chapter, Kenneth Aizawa enters into this debate and argues that multiple realization is alive and well in the sciences of the mind and brain, albeit in a more restricted form than many proponents of autonomy have previously endorsed. Focusing on examples from vision science, he argues that when one attends to actual scientific practice it becomes clear how evidence for different underlying neural mechanisms (lower-level realizer properties) for a given psychological capacity (higher- level realized properties) are not always handled in identical ways. Sometimes this information is used to support multiple realizability claims. Other times it is not. More specifically, Aizawa makes the case that scientists do not always adopt an “eliminate- and-split” strategy according to which differences in the realizer properties result in the elimination of the putative multiply realized higher-level property in favor of two (or more) distinct higher-level psychological properties corresponding to the different realizers. The role of the “eliminate-and-split” strategy has been the subject of much philosophical discussion since Fodor (1974) first explicitly identified it as a theoretical possibility: [W]e could, if we liked, require the taxonomies of the special sciences to correspond to the taxonomy of physics [or neuroscience] by insisting upon distinctions between the natural kinds postulated by the former wherever they turn out to correspond to distinct natural kinds in the latter. (Fodor 1974, 112) If neuroscientists always applied this taxonomic strategy, multiple realizability would be ruled out in principle since differences in how the realizer properties are taxono- mizedwouldalwaysreflectdifferencesinhowtherealizedpropertiesaretaxonomized. Clearly, this would undercut the prospects for an autonomous psychology. Aizawa aims to show that this is not always the case; sometimes the higher-level taxonomy is resilient in the face of discovered differences in lower-level realizers. Aizawa defends the view that how discoveries about different lower-level realizers are treated depends on specific features of the higher-level theory. In particular, sometimes higher-level
- 26. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 11 psychological kinds are theorized in such a way as to permit a degree of individual variation in underlying mechanisms; other times they are not. It is only in the latter case that higher-level psychological kinds are eliminated and split in light of evidence about different underlying mechanisms. In cases of the former, higher-level kinds are retained in spite of such evidence. Aizawa thus offers a more nuanced account of the role of multiple realizability considerations in contemporary mind and brain science, and aims to show how a piecemeal or partial but nonetheless genuine form of autonomy of higher-level psychological kinds may be secured. This is not the sweeping autonomy that Fodor envisioned, where the structural taxonomy of neuroscience never interacts, informs, or otherwise constrains the functional taxonomy of psychology. Neither is it a wholesale form of reduction where the higher-level kinds are slavishly dictated by the taxonomic divisions established by the lower-level science. Instead, sometimes (but not always) higher-level kinds are retained in spite of such divisions. 4. Functional and Computational Explanation A somewhat different strategy for establishing the autonomy of psychology, which does not directly rely on appeals to multiple realizability, involves identifying the dis- tinctive kind (or kinds) of explanation constructed and used across these different disciplines. The key idea here is that the discipline of psychology has its own explana- tory patterns, which do not simply mimic those of another more fundamental discipline and are not reducible to them. According to the general line of argument, although the prevalent form of explanation in the neurosciences and other biological sciences is mechanistic explanation (Bechtel 2008; Bechtel and Richardson 1993/2010; Craver 2007; Machamer et al. 2000), the dominant form of explanation in psychology is functional or computational explanation. Critically, the latter are not to be assimi- lated to the former; they are distinct kinds of explanation. 4.1 Functional explanation Itiswidelyassumedthattheprimary(althoughnotexclusive)explanandainpsychology are sensory, motor, and cognitive capacities such as object recognition or working memory (e.g., Von Eckardt 1995); and that psychologists explain these capacities by providing a functional analysis (e.g., Cummins 1975, 1983; Fodor 1965, 1968). Cummins defines functional analysis as follows: “Functional analysis consists in analysing a disposition into a number of less problematic dispositions such that [the] programmed manifestation of these analyzing dispositions amounts to a manifestation of the analysed disposition” (Cummins 1983, 28). The central idea is that functional analysis involves decomposing or breaking down a target capacity (or disposition) of a system into a set of simpler sub-capacities and specifying how these are organized to yield the capacity to be explained. Traditionally, functional analysis has been thought to provide a distinct form of explanation from mechanistic explanation, the dominant
- 27. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 12 DAVID M. KAPLAN mode of explanation employed in many lower-level sciences including neuroscience (Cummins 1975, 1983; Fodor 1965, 1968). Call this the DISTINCTNESS thesis. As a reminder, mechanistic explanations describe the organized assemblies of component parts and activities responsible for maintaining, producing, or underlying the phe- nomenon of interest (Bechtel 2008; Bechtel and Richardson 1993/2010; Craver 2007; Machamer et al. 2000). Cummins expresses his commitment to DISTINCTNESS in the following passages: Form-function correlation is certainly absent in many cases, however, and it is therefore important to keep functional analysis and componential [mechanistic] analysis conceptually distinct. (1983, 29) Since we do this sort of analysis [functional analysis] without reference to an instantiating system, the analysis is evidently not an analysis of the instantiating system. (Cummins 1983, 29) Fodor similarly embraces DISTINCTNESS when he states: “[V]is-à-vis explanations of behavior, neurological theories specify mechanisms and psychological theories do not” (1965, 177). Although DISTINCTNESS does not entail the autonomy of psychology from neuroscience (call this the AUTONOMY thesis), often these are defended together. Thus, Cummins embraces AUTONOMY when he claims: “[T]his analysis [functional analysis] seems to put no constraints at all on [a given system’s] componential analysis” (Cummins 1983, 30). Taken together, these claims about DISTINCTNESS and AUTONOMY form what has been called the received view about psychological explanation (Barrett 2014; Piccinini and Craver 2011). In their chapter in this volume, Roth and Cummins further refine the influential positionfirstdevelopedbyCummins(1983).Theyarguethataproperunderstandingof functional analysis permits us to see how it provides a distinct and autonomous kind of explanation that cannot be assimilated to that of mechanistic explanation, but which nevertheless bears an evidential or confirmational relation to the description of under- lying mechanisms. As an illustrative example, they describe a functional analysis of the capacitytomultiplynumbersgivenintermsofthepartialproductsalgorithm.Thestep- by-step algorithm specification provided by the functional analysis reveals little to no information about the implementing mechanism, yet they argue that the analysis pro- vided by the algorithm provides a complete explanation for the capacity in question. According to the view Roth and Cummins defend, the functional analysis permits an understanding of why any system possessing the capacity for computing the algorithm ipso facto exhibits the specific regularities or patterns that constitute the phenomenon to be explained. And this, they argue, is all that is being requested of the explanation. Roth and Cummins acknowledge that information about lower-level implementa- tion details can deepen our understanding of the systems whose capacities are targeted by functional analyses. But they nevertheless stress that, strictly speaking, this infor- mation should neither be interpreted as a proper part of the explanation nor as a requirement on adequate functional explanation. In their words, “having a fuller understanding of a system, in this sense, is not the same thing as having a more
- 28. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 13 complete explanation of the [capacity] targeted for functional analysis.” “(Roth and Cummins,thisvolume,37).RothandCummins instead suggest that there is a crucial distinction between explaining a capacity via functional analysis (what they call horizontal explanation) and explaining how a functional analysis is implemented (what they call vertical explanation)—a distinction which, in their opinion, has been repeatedly elided or conflated in the literature. In other words, functional explanation is not mechanistic explanation. While evidence from neuroscience is relevant to determining which functional ana- lysis is correct, they argue that the specific role that details about underlying neural mechanisms plays is one of confirmation not explanation. As they put it, “bringing such knowledge to bear in this instance would be an exercise in confirming a proposed ana- lysis, not explaining a capacity.” “(Roth and Cummins, this volume, 39). Their discussion provides an important clarification of the original, highly influential position first articulated by Cummins (1983). The chapter also raises the stakes in the current debate, since it stands diametrically opposed to recent attempts by proponents of the mechan- istic perspective to identify functional analyses as elliptical or incomplete mechanistic explanations (Piccinini and Craver 2011). This view will be taken up in detail below. Along similar lines, in his chapter, Daniel Weiskopf argues that psychological models can be explanatorily adequate in the sense that they satisfy standardly accepted norms of good explanation such as providing the ability to answer a range of counterfactual questions regarding the target phenomenon and the ability to manipulate and control the target phenomenon, without necessarily being mechanistic. A cognitive model (sometimesalsoreferredtoasa“box-and-arrow”model;seeDatteriandLaudisa2014) involves a set of functionally interacting components each of which is characterized on the basis of its functional profile (and typically couched in representational or information-processing terms). According to Weiskopf, cognitive models can provide perfectly legitimate causal explanations of psychological capacities by describing the way information is represented and processed. Although these models evidently describe real causal structure, they do not embody determinate commitments about the neural mechanisms or structures underlying these capacities. They do not provide a specifiable decomposition of the target system into spatially localizable physical parts, and critically, these mechanistic details do not need to be filled in for the model to be endowed with explanatory force. Consequently, on Weiskopf’s view, psychological explanation is fundamentally different in kind to mechanistic explanation. 4.2 Computational explanation Along closely related lines, others have argued that computational explanations of psychological capacities are different in character from the mechanistic explanations found in neuroscience and other life sciences. Sejnowski, Koch, and Churchland (1988) express one primary motivation for this view: Mechanical and causal explanations of chemical and electrical signals in the brain are different from computational explanations. The chief difference is that a computational explanation
- 29. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 14 DAVID M. KAPLAN refers to the information content in the physical signals and how they are used to accomplish a task. (Sejnowski et al. 1988, 1300) According to this perspective, computational explanations differ because they appeal to information-processing or representational or semantic notions, and this somehow makes them incompatible with the mechanistic framework. Recent advocates of the mechanistic approach counter that computational explanation can be readily under- stood as a species of mechanistic explanation despite having distinctive features (Bechtel 2008; Kaplan 2011; Piccinini 2007; Boone and Piccinini 2016). Others have attempted to draw a stark boundary between computational and mechanistic explanations by arguing that computational explanations are abstract or mathematical in a way that prevents their integration into the mechanistic framework (e.g., Chirimuuta 2014). On Chirimuuta’s view, computational explanations—even those constructed in computational neuroscience—embody a “distinct explanatory style” which “cannot be assimilated into the mechanistic framework” because they “indicate a mathematical operation—a computation—not a biological mechanism” (2014, 124). Since these explanations are claimed to be highly abstract—focusing on the high-level computations being performed—they are supposed to enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy from low-level details about underlying neural mechanisms. This is a version of the multiple realizability claim encountered above. In his contribution to this volume, David Kaplan argues that this kind of claim rests on persistent confusions about multiple realizability and its implications for mechanistic explanation. Specifically, he argues against the lessons that Chirimuuta and others wish to draw from recent modeling work involving so-called canonical neural computations—standard computational modules that apply the same funda- mental operations across multiple brain areas. Because these neural computations can rely on diverse circuits and mechanisms, modeling the underlying mechanisms is argued to be of limited explanatory value. They take this work as evidence that computational neuroscientists sometimes employ a distinctive explanatory scheme fromthatofmechanisticexplanation.Kaplanoffersreasonsforthinkingthisconclusion is unjustified, and addresses why multiple realization does not always limit the pros- pects for mechanistic explanation. In her contribution to the volume, Frances Egan argues for a position on the same side of the debate as Chirimuuta and others who seek to defend the distinctness and autonomyofcomputationalexplanation.Eganarguesthatacommontypeofexplanation in computational cognitive science is what she terms function-theoretic explanation. Building on ideas from her earlier work (Egan 1995, 2010), she contends that this type of explanation involves articulating how a given system computes some mathematic- ally well-defined function and how performing this computation contributes to the target capacity in question. For example, Marr famously proposed that the early visual system performs edge detection by computing the zero-crossing of second-derivative filtered versions of the retinal inputs (i.e., the Laplacian of a Gaussian; ∇2 G*I)—a well-
- 30. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 15 definedmathematicalfunction.Thisisaparadigmaticfunction-theoreticexplanation— because it provides a mathematically precise specification of what the early visual systemdoesandanadequateexplanationofhowitdoesit.AccordingtoEgan,function- theoretic characterizations can possess explanatory import even in the absence of detailsabouthowsuchcomputationsareimplementedinneuralsystems.Consequently, they are not properly interpreted as mechanistic explanations. Views about autonomous computational explanation are often backed up by appeals to David Marr’s influential tri-level computational framework. According to Marr (1982), there are three distinct levels of analysis that apply to all information- processing systems ranging from digital computers to the brain: the computational level (a specification of what function is being computed and why it is computed), the algorithmic level (a specification of the representations and computational transformations defined over those representations), and the implementation level (a specification of how the other levels are physically realized). Marr’s discussion of the relationships between these levels appears to reinforce the idea of an autonomous levelofcomputationalexplanation.First,herepeatedlyprioritizestherelativeimportance of the computational level: [I]t is the top level, the level of computational theory, which is critically important from the information-processing point of view. The reason for this is that the nature of the computations . . . depends more upon the computational problems to be solved than upon the particular hardware in which their solutions are implemented. (Marr 1982, 27) This privileging of the computational level, coupled with the fact that his preferred methodology is top-down, moving from the computational level to the algorithmic, and ultimately, to implementation, has fostered the idea of an autonomous level of computationalexplanation.Second,insomepassages,Marrappearstoclaimthatthere areeithernodirectconstraintsbetweenlevelsorthattheoperativeconstraintsarerela- tively weak and only flow downward from the computational level—claims that are clearly at odds with the mechanistic view. For instance, he states that: “since the three levels are only rather loosely related, some phenomena may be explained at only one or two of them” (1982, 25). If computational explanations were unconstrained by one another in this manner, this could certainly be used to draw a conclusion about an explanatorily autonomous level. Nevertheless, there are numerous places where Marr sounds much more mechanis- tic in his tone (for further discussion, see Kaplan 2011). Although his general compu- tational framework clearly emphasizes how one and the same computation might in principle be performed by a wide array of distinct algorithms and implemented in a broad range of physical systems, when the focus is on explaining a particular cogni- tive capacity such as human vision, Marr appears to strongly reject the claim that any computationally adequate algorithm (i.e., one that has the same input–output profile or computes the same function) can provide an equally appropriate explanation of how the computation is performed in that particular system. After outlining their
- 31. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 16 DAVID M. KAPLAN computational hypothesis for the extraction of zero-crossings in early vision, Marr quickly shifts gears to determine “whether the human visual system implements these algorithms or something close to them” (Marr and Hildreth 1980, 205; see also Marr et al. 1979; Marr 1982). The broader context for this passage suggests that Marr did not view this as a secondary task, to be undertaken after the complete and fully autono- mous computational explanation is given. Instead, Marr appears to be sensitive to the critical explanatory role played by information about neural implementation. On this interpretation, Marr’s view is much more closely aligned with the mainstream of con- temporary computational neuroscience. Interestingly, Tomaso Poggio, one of Marr’s principal collaborators and a highly accomplished computational neuroscientist in his own right, recently espoused a view that similarly emphasizes the importance of elaborating the various connections and constraints operative between different levels of analysis. He argues that real progress in computational neuroscience will only be achieved if we attend to the connections between levels (Poggio 2010). In their contributed chapter, Oron Shagrir and William Bechtel shed further light on the nature of computational explanation and its status vis-à-vis the mechanistic approach. Like many seeking to understand computational explanation, they too engage with Marr’s foundational work on the topic. They focus their attention on what they view as an underappreciated feature of Marr’s (1982) account of the com- putational level of analysis. Marr defines the computational level as the “level of what the device does and why” (1982, 22). The role of the what-aspect is relatively straightforward, involving a specification of what computation is being performed (or what mathematical function is being computed). The role of the why-aspect is different—it specifies how the specific computations being performed are adequate to the information-processing task. According to Shagrir and Bechtel, many interpreters of Marr have provided an incomplete analysis of the computational level because they have neglected the what-aspect. Part of the reason for this neglect is that Marr never provides a detailed and systematic account of this aspect of the computational level. In their chapter, Shagrir and Bechtel offer a plausible reconstruction of Marr’s views concerning the computational level. They maintain that the why-aspect characterizes why a particular computation is the one the system in fact needs to perform, given the structure of the physical environment in which it is embedded (i.e., the target domain). Marr (1982) calls these constraints imposed by the physical environment “physical constraints,” and implies that any visual system worth its salt must be capable of preserving certain structural relations present in the target domain (i.e., must be “designed” to reflect these physical constraints). However, Marr’s original discussion raises more questions than it provides answers. It is here that Shagrir and Bechtel make real headway. They argue that the why-aspect of the computational analysis provides a characterization of thestructure-preservingmappingrelationbetweenthecomputedfunctionandthetarget domain. It thus serves to relate the physical constraints to the computed function—and in doing so, it demonstrates the appropriateness of the computed function for the
- 32. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 17 information-processing task at hand. This, according to Shagrir and Bechtel, is why the early visual system computes the Laplacian of a Gaussian as opposed to performing multiplication or exponentiation or factorization. Shagrir and Bechtel also make the case that the computational level of analysis pro- vides indispensable information for the construction of mechanistic explanations in so far as it specifies the target phenomenon to be explained in precise quantitative or mathematical terms. They argue that delineating scientific phenomena in general is an essential and highly non-trivial scientific task, and it is a specific prerequisite for building mechanistic explanations. Hence, another one of Marr’s great insights was to highlight the importance of having a clear and precise specification of the computational phenomenon in order to develop an explanation. 5. Mechanistic Explanation Advocates of the mechanistic approach to explanation have articulated a vision of disciplinary integration that neither bottoms out in classical theory reduction nor attempts to undermine arguments for the autonomy of psychology by challenging multiple realizability claims (Bechtel 2007, 2008; Piccinini and Craver 2011). According tomanydefendersofthemechanisticperspective,thetraditionalframingofthedebate imposes a false choice between reduction and autonomy because it implies that these are mutually exclusive options. Bechtel, for example, maintains that the key to resolving thisdebateisunderstandinghowthemechanisticframeworkenablesa“rapproachement between reductionism and the independence of investigations focused on higher levels of organization” (Bechtel 2008, 158). 5.1 Modest reductionism afforded by the mechanistic approach According to Bechtel (2007, 2008), the kinds of reduction achieved through mech anistic explanations, in contrast to those posited by the traditional theory reduction model, are fully compatible with a robust notion of autonomy for psychology and other special sciences. He states: Within the mechanistic framework one does not have to reject reduction in order to allow for the independence of the higher-level sciences. The decomposition required by mechanistic explanation is reductionist, but the recognition that parts and operations must be organized into an appropriate whole provides a robust sense of a higher level of organization. (Bechtel 2008, 130) Mechanistic explanations are reductionist in the specific sense that they seek to explain the overall pattern of activity or phenomenon generated by the mechanism as a whole by appealing to lower-level component parts and their activities. Yet despite this reductionist character, it is claimed to be (more) palatable to anti-reductionists because mechanistic explanations involve a non-trivial form of autonomy in so far as the higher-level (spatial and temporal) organization of the components in a target
- 33. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 18 DAVID M. KAPLAN mechanism is often essential to producing the phenomenon to be explained. According to Bechtel, “[m]odes of organization are not determined by the compo- nents but are imposed on them” (Bechtel 2007, 192). Furthermore, successful mechanistic explanations sometimes go beyond describing the local mechanism and its underlying components because they appeal to conditions of the broader system or environment in which the mechanism is embedded and without which they could not perform their functions (Bechtel 2008). This too has been argued to secure the autonomy of higher levels of organization and explanation that do not directly depend on multiple realizability. Relatedly, the mechanistic framework embodies a distinctive account of levels of organization in mechanisms, which in turn affords a more modest view of reduction than the traditional theory reduction model. Whereas the traditional approach assumes that higher-level theories can be reduced in succession to increasingly lower levels until some fundamental level is reached, which in turn grounds all the higher levels, the mechanistic approach rejects this global account of reduction. Although mechanistic explanations are reductionist in the sense that they appeal to lower-level parts and their operations to explain some higher-level behavior of the mechanism, the reductions supported have a local character since there is no single fundamental level that globally grounds all higher levels of mechanisms. In stark contrast to traditional approaches that construe levels as global strata spanning the natural world (Oppenheim and Putnam 1958), levels of organization in mechanisms are local in the sense that they are defined relative to a given mechanism (Bechtel 2008; Craver 2007). In a particular mechanistic context, two arbitrary elements are deemed to reside at the same mechanistic level only if they are components in the same mechanism, and they occupy a higher or lower level depending on how they figure into a componential or part-whole relation within a mechanism. Critically, questions concerning whether components of a given mechanism (or the mechanism as a whole) reside at a higher, lower, or the same level as entities outside the mechanism are not well defined (Bechtel 2008; Craver 2007). 5.2 Functional analysis as elliptical mechanistic explanation Along somewhat different lines, Piccinini and Craver (2011) maintain that the mechanistic perspective encourages a rethinking of the received view of psychological explanation as a kind of functional analysis or functional explanation (e.g., Cummins, 1975, 1983, 2000; Fodor 1968), which eliminates all commitments to autonomy. Piccinini and Craver (2011) reject the received view and instead argue that functional and mechanistic explanations are neither distinct nor autonomous from one another precisely because functional analysis, when properly constrained, provides a kind of mechanistic explanation—partial or elliptical mechanistic explanation.1 Mechanistic 1 Arguably, a precursor of this view was articulated and defended much earlier by Bechtel and Richardson (1993/2010). In that work, they repeatedly emphasize how both functional and structural
- 34. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 19 explanations, which are prevalent throughout the biological sciences including neuroscience, involve the identification of the mechanism responsible for maintaining, producing, or underlying the phenomenon of interest (Bechtel 2008; Bechtel and Richardson 1993, 2010; Craver 2007; Craver and Darden 2013; Machamer et al. 2000). Piccinini and Craver maintain that this shift in perspective will open up a pathway for “building a unified science of cognition” (2011, 284). Their main claim is as follows: The core idea is that functional analyses are sketches of mechanisms, in which some structural aspects of a mechanistic explanation are omitted. Once the missing aspects are filled in, a functional analysis turns into a full-blown mechanistic explanation. By this process, functional analyses are seamlessly integrated with multilevel mechanistic explanations. (Piccinini and Craver 2011, 284) According to Piccinini and Craver (2011), a functional analysis is a mechanism sketch in which the capacity to be explained is decomposed into sub-capacities, yet most if not all of the information about the underlying structural components or parts is omitted. According to the mechanistic perspective they endorse, structural informa- tion provides an essential source of constraints on functional analyses. It must be incorporated if a given analysis is to count as revealing the causal organization of the system and in turn explanatory. As they put it: If the connection between analyzing tasks and components is severed completely, then there is no clear sense in which the analyzing sub-capacities are aspects of the actual causal structure of the system as opposed to arbitrary partitions of the system’s capacities or merely possible causal structures. (Piccinini and Craver 2011, 293) Once the missing structural information about the components underlying each identified sub-capacity is filled in, the mechanism sketch is transformed into a (more complete) mechanistic explanation. TheproposedpictureinvolvesarejectionofbothDISTINCTNESSandAUTONOMY. Since functional analysis is conceived as a kind of mechanistic explanation—elliptical mechanistic explanation—it cannot be distinct from mechanistic explanation. Because distinctness is a necessary condition for autonomy, the view also entails a rejection of AUTONOMY. Beyond this, the view also embodies a positive account of the inter- action between the explanatory frameworks of psychology and neuroscience. The identification of sub-capacities in a functional analysis is argued to place very real and decompositions of a target system (decomposition and localization, respectively) must be incorporated to produce adequate mechanistic explanations. Decomposition “allows the subdivision of the explanatory task so that the task becomes manageable and the system intelligible” and “assumes that one activity of a whole system is the product of a set of subordinate functions performed in the system” (Bechtel and Richardson 2010, 23). In addition, the decomposed sub-capacities must also be assigned to structural com- ponents of the underlying mechanism. In other words, they must be localized. Localization involves the “identification of the different activities proposes in a task decomposition with the behavior or capacities of specific components” (Bechtel and Richardson, 2010, 24). Therefore, according to their view, identify- ing either the functional or structural properties of a system alone will fail to yield an adequate mechanistic explanation. Instead, mechanistic explanation requires both a functional and structural analysis of the target system. These are complementary, not independent or competing endeavors.
- 35. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 20 DAVID M. KAPLAN direct constraints on which components can engage in those capacities. In particular, the analysis generates, at a minimum, the expectation that for each identified sub- capacity there will be a corresponding structure or set of structures that implements the capacity. This is what is supposed to help to ensure that the proposed functional decomposition goes beyond providing a merely possible partitioning of the system, and succeeds in revealing its real causal structure. On this mechanistic view, the explanatory projects of psychology and neuroscience coincide and are deeply inter- twined because both provide complementary and mutually constraining descriptions of different aspects of the same multi-level mechanisms. One describes function, the other describes underlying structure. In their contribution to the volume, Corey Maley and Gualtiero Piccinini aim to provide a suitable foundation for functional ascriptions at the heart of the mechanistic enterprise. Mechanistic explanations involve the identification of underlying compo- nent parts and attributions of specific functions performed by those components. Yet surprisingly little work has been done to investigate what underwrites these functional ascriptions in a mechanistic context (for a notable exception, see Craver (2001, 2013). Having an account of functions in hand would, for example, allow one to distinguish cases that justify the ascription of particular functions from those that do not. Maley and Piccinini contend that understanding how functions are ascribed to neural and cognitivemechanismsandtheirpartsiscriticalforafullyadequateaccountofmulti-level mechanistic explanation. They reject standard etiological accounts of function, which face many well-known criticisms including that the selective or evolutionary histories proposed to ground functional attributions are often exceedingly difficult if not impossible to discover and so routinely remain unknown. Relatedly, it is frequently objected that functions are often plausibly attributed in the absence of historical information about a system. They also reject causal role accounts, which successfully avoid the discovery problem by groundingfunctioninasystem’scurrentcausalpowers,butneverthelessfaceadifferent set of challenges. It is widely argued that causal accounts involve an overly permissive concept of function, which makes it difficult to define a counterpart notion of malfunction and relatedly distinguish between how things ought to work (their proper functions) from how they in fact work. For these reasons, Maley and Piccinini instead develop a teleological account of function according to which functions are defined in terms of their stable contribution to a current objective goal of a biological organism (e.g., survival or inclusive fitness). They maintain that a primary advantage of their accountisthat,likestandardcausalaccounts,functionsaregroundedincurrentcausal powers. However, unlike standard accounts, theirs is claimed to be more restrictive such that a distinction between function/malfunction can be drawn. The mechanistic perspective thus appears to offer a number of promising routes to achieving explanatory integration or unification of mind and brain science, while at the same time, undermining the historically influential view of autonomous psycho- logical explanation. But, like the philosophical views canvassed above, it too faces
- 36. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 21 obstacles. One primary objection is that in treating functional analyses in psychology asellipticalmechanisticexplanationstobefilledinbyneuroscience,theprospectsfora sufficiently weighty or substantive form of autonomy for higher-level psychological explanation becomes rather bleak. A number of challenges along these lines are raised in contributions to this volume. 6. High-Level Causal Explanation Recent philosophical work on mechanistic explanation is often interpreted as having undesirable imperialistic tendencies. In his contribution, James Woodward argues against the claim recently attributed to some proponents of mechanism that only mechanistic models in neuroscience and psychology explain. In particular, he seeks to combat the view that models which include more mechanistic detail will always be explanatorily superior to those that include less detail. This more-details-the-better view has been attributed to Kaplan and Craver (2011), among others. Woodward instead maintains that many successful explanatory models across both neuroscience and psychology often purposefully abstract away from all manner of lower-level implementation (e.g., neurobiological or molecular) details in order to highlight just those factors that make a difference to whether or not the target phenomenon occurs (so-called difference makers). Woodward claims that such models can and often do provide perfectly legitimate explanations, and that resources from the interventionist account of causal explanation can illuminate their explanatory status. According to the interventionist approach, explanatory models permit the answer- ing of what Woodward (2003) calls what-if-things-had-been-different questions. They identify conditions that, had they been otherwise, would “make a difference” to the target phenomenon to be explained. This includes conditions under which the target phenomenon would not have occurred, would have occurred at a different rate, etc. This requirement is important because it implies that successful explanations will pick out just those conditions or factors that are explanatorily or causally relevant to the phenomenon to be explained (i.e., the difference makers). The notion of causal or explanatory relevance (or difference making) is in turn cashed out in terms of inter- ventions. Roughly, X causes (or is causally relevant to) Y just in case, given some set of background circumstances, it is possible to change Y (or the probability distribution of Y) by intervening on X. The notion of intervention is here understood in a technical sense common in the philosophical and statistical literature (e.g., Spirtes et al. 2000; Woodward 2003). The idea is that a causal relationship can be inferred between X and Y when the intervention is “surgical,” i.e., when the intervention on X changes the value of Y “directly” and does not involve changing the values of other possibly confounding variables that could in turn change the value of Y (for further discussion, see Woodward 2003). Interventions are therefore naturally thought of as idealized (perfectlycontrolledandnon-confounded)versionsofrealexperimentalmanipulations routinely performed in the lab.
- 37. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 22 DAVID M. KAPLAN The interventionist approach stands to legitimize higher-level explanations in two ways. First, it opens up the possibility that sometimes relatively abstract, higher-level explanations can provide better explanations than more detailed, lower-level ones. This is because the lower-level ones might include irrelevant or inessential details whose variations or changes make no difference to the target phenomenon and thus serve to obscure the difference-making factors. Second, this particular way of thinking about causal relationships opens the door to higher-level causal explanations since higher-level factors such as attentional load, memory capacity, or general psychological state can in principle serve equally well as the targets of such interventions as lower- levelneurobiologicalormolecularfactors.Hence,theinterventionistframeworkholds promise to illuminate the causal and explanatory relevance of high-level factors, and in doing so legitimize high-level, relatively abstract explanations found throughout psychology and neuroscience.2 In his chapter, Woodward focuses on relatively abstract neurobiological models suchasconductancemodelsandeventheHodgkin-Huxleymodeloftheactionpoten- tial, whose explanatory credentials have been subject to intense debate in the recent philosophical literature (e.g., Bogen 2005, 2008; Craver 2006, 2007, 2008; Kaplan 2011; Levy 2014; Levy and Bechtel 2013; Schaffner 2008; Weber 2008). Woodward’s general conclusion here is that the interventionist framework can be used to illuminate how models in neurobiology and psychology that abstract away from certain lower-level implementational details can nonetheless be explanatory. If successful, this secures a kind of partial autonomy of higher-level explanations and models from lower-level mechanistic details. Woodward argues that higher-level psychological models need not be seen as auto- matically competing with lower-level neurobiological models. Whether the higher- or lower-level model is most appropriate, or provides a superior explanation, depends on the phenomenon one is trying to explain. Sometimes lower-level details about neural implementation will be causally relevant and so must be incorporated into the model if it is to be explanatorily adequate. Other times such details will be irrelevant to (make no difference for) the phenomenon of interest, and so can be safely ignored in one’s model without affecting its explanatory power. Woodward finds that modeling practices in psychology and neuroscience are often exquisitely sensitive to the goal of trying to include just enough detail to account for what one is trying to explain but no more.Thismessagedovetailsnicelywithviewscommonlyexpressedbycomputational modelers who are continually trying to find the appropriate balance of detail and abstraction in their models so as to best account for the phenomenon of interest. For example, the computational neuroscientist Trappenberg (2010) asserts that “[m]odels are intended to simplify experimental data, and thereby to identify which details of the biology are essential to explain particular aspects of a system” (2010, 6). He is triangu- lating on the idea that simpler, relatively abstract models can often provide superior 2 Woodward (2008, 2010) explores similar questions in the contexts of psychiatry and biology.
- 38. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 23 explanations in so far as they include only the “essential” details. Woodward aims to provide principled reasons for the neglect of lower-level mechanistic details when attempting to build explanatory models in mind and brain science. In particular, he argues that such details may be safely ignored precisely when they are causally and explanatorily irrelevant—they make no difference—to the phenomena under investi- gation. In these cases, higher-level explanations are not subject to constraint from facts about these lower-level details. The explanatory autonomy of psychology, according to this view, can be seen as stemming from the causal irrelevance of lower-level details about neural implementation. Variation in neural details sometimes makes no differ- ence for the phenomenon under consideration, and so they can be abstracted away from without explanatory repercussions. In his contribution, Michael Strevens takes up similar themes. Like Woodward, he too seeks to shed light on higher-level causal explanations in sciences like biology, economics, and psychology, which seem to possess explanatory force despite the fact that they abstract away from—place “black boxes” around—many of lower-level mechanistic or implementational details. Although Strevens recognizes the intuitive pull of the idea that these models provide adequate explanations, he is cautious about embracing it. Strevens carefully considers the challenges posed by convergent evolution for detail-oriented modeling approaches including the mechanistic approach. Because convergent evolution generates functional kinds that are instantiated by radically dif- ferent physical realizations, modeling the underlying mechanisms is supposed to be of limited explanatory value. In such cases, more abstract or less detailed models appear to provide better (e.g., more unifying) explanations than those bogged down in the mechanistic details. Even worse, mechanistic explanation may seem entirely out of reach in such cases. For example, while there may well be some interesting high-level or abstract explanatory models or generalizations about wings, which are thought to have evolved independently approximately forty times throughout history, a demand thattheirexplanationsatisfythestricturesofthemechanisticapproachmaygoentirely unfulfilled since the mechanistic details vary considerably across these instances. (There are important parallels between these issues and those discussed in the chapter by Kaplan in this volume.) Strevens recognizes the intuitive force behind this type of (multiple realizability- based) argument for the autonomy and explanatory superiority of abstract, higher- levelexplanations.Henonethelessmaintainsthatsometimesmodelsinwhichlower-level details are omitted or black-boxed can mistakenly be deemed explanatorily adequate and complete because of a subtle and unrecognized shift in the target phenomenon to be explained. Specifically, Strevens argues that there is a tendency to conflate the difference between explaining the common instantiation of the same functional kind (e.g., wing) by several different (types of) entities versus the instantiation of the func- tional kind by a single entity (e.g., the avian wing). According to Strevens, not only are these fundamentally different explananda, but they also require different explanations
- 39. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi 24 DAVID M. KAPLAN with varying amounts of mechanistic detail. Explanations of the former may be highly abstract (suppressing or “black-boxing” many or most of the underlying mechanistic details) in order to highlight the common factor (or set of factors) causally relevant to the outcome across the different instances. But critically, the set of factors cited in such explanations is argued to fall well short of exhausting the complete set of factors relevant to any individual instantiation (e.g., the avian wing or the insect wing), and so these types of explanation will typically require considerably more mechanistic detail. Strevens suggests that some multiple realizability-based arguments for the explana- tory autonomy of higher-level sciences including psychology similarly exploit this slippage in order to conclude that abstract explanations are superior to detailed ones. And while he agrees that models with more detail are not always better, he disagrees that models with less detail are always better. Instead, Strevens, like Woodward, main- tains that the appropriate level of detail depends sensitively on the phenomena one wants to explain. In his contribution to the volume, Dominic Murphy addresses the role of folk psychologyanditsrelationtothesciencesofthemindandthebrain.Isfolkpsychological explanation sui generis and therefore distinct and autonomous from scientific psychology and neuroscience? Or is it continuous with scientific approaches to the mind and brain, and therefore a potential candidate for integration? Folk psychology refers to the commonsense conceptual framework that all normally socialized humans usetounderstand,predict,explain,andcontrolthebehaviorofotherhumansandhigher non-human animals (Churchland 1998). Murphy identifies and explores three broad perspectives on folk psychology—integration, autonomy, and elimination. According to the integrationist perspective, folk psychology defines the phenomena that the cog- nitive and brain sciences seek to investigate and explain, and thus plays a permanent albeit limited role in scientific inquiry. According to the autonomist perspective, folk psychology comprises a perfectly legitimate explanatory framework but one that is fundamentally different in character and therefore incompatible or incommensurable with the explanatory frameworks of cognitive science and neuroscience. Whereas the explanatory framework of folk psychology operates at the level of people and their sensations, beliefs, desires, and intentions (the personal level), the explanatory frame- works of cognitive science and neuroscience operate at the sub-personal level of the information-processing and brain mechanisms underlying these personal-level activities. According to the autonomist, folk psychology comprises a fully autonomous and self-contained domain of personal-level explanation that is neither confirmed nor refuted by empirical evidence from mind and brain science. According to the eliminativist perspective, folk psychology is a massively false theory that should be replaced in favor of another more predictively and empirically adequate scientific theory, presumably from neuroscience. After dismissing the autonomist perspective, Murphy focuses on exposing the limitations of the integrationist perspective. According to the integrationist, the job
- 40. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/08/2017, SPi INTEGRATING MIND AND BRAIN SCIENCE 25 description for folk psychology is to specify the explananda for scientific psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and critically, that it has done reasonably well at complet- ing this job. Murphy rejects the latter claim and argues that since the taxonomic divi- sions of folk psychology have been laid down independently of constraints from evidence about neural implementation they fail to limn the contours of the mind. Consequently, folk psychology cannot play the role integrationists envision for it. Instead,theexplanandaforthecognitiveandbrainscienceshavethemselvesbeensub- ject to rather heavy revision in the light of information about the workings and struc- ture of the brain. Hence, Murphy argues, we are left in the position of endorsing eliminativism as the only scientifically viable option. Nevertheless, Murphy embraces a less radical form of eliminativism than many others because he thinks folk psychology will be retained as a central part of the “manifest image” in light of its continuing practical, heuristic, and social roles. 7. Conclusion Understanding the multi-faceted relationship between neuroscience and psychological science is vital to achieving progress across these scientific domains. Elucidating the nature of explanation in these sciences provides one highly fruitful avenue for exploring these issues. Are the explanatory patterns employed across these domains similar or different in kind? To what extent do they inform and constrain each other? Or, are they autonomous? Questions of this sort concerning explanation and how this shapes our thinking about the prospects for integrating mind and brain science occupies center stage in this volume. Ontheonehand,theemergenceofcognitiveneurosciencesuggeststhattheintegra- tion of mind and brain science is already largely upon us or is an inevitable future out- come. Moreover, the growing dominance of the mechanistic approach to explanation further reinforces a picture of unity and integration between explanatory frameworks. And yet, on the other hand, there nevertheless appears to be strong reasons for think- ing that a psychological science will, over the long term, retain some partial degree of explanatory autonomy. Although a final resolution continues to elude us, the chapters contained in this volume succeed in pushing this important debate forward. References Anderson, J. R. (1996). The architecture of cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Barrett, D. (2014). Functional analysis and mechanistic explanation. Synthese, 191(12), 2695–714. Bechtel, W. (2007). Reducing psychology while maintaining its autonomy via mechanistic explanation. In M. Schouten and H. Looren de Jong (Eds.), The Matter of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychology, Neuroscience and Reduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell , pp. 172–98.
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- 44. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi This is a volume about the relation of psychology to neuroscience, and in particular, about whether psychological states and processes can be reduced to neurological ones. The pressure for reduction in science (and a consequent conflation of explanatory adequacy and evidential adequacy) is an artifact of what we call the nomic conception of science (NCS): the idea that the content of science is a collection of laws, and that scientific explanation is subsumption under these laws. NCS, in effect, identifies explanation with reduction: no reduction, no explanation. Psychological states appear to be irreducible because they are widely thought to be functional states: states defined by their role in a containing system. The reduction of psychological states to their neural implementations therefore appears to be blocked by the multiple realizability of functional states: door stops need not be made of rubber to function as door stops, and psychological states need not be implemented in car- bon-based neural tissue as opposed to, say, silicon-based circuitry, to qualify as psychological states. If psychological states cannot be reduced to neural states, if psychology is an autonomous science, then the mind appears to be sui generis, and psychology appears disconnected from the rest of science. But functional analysis, we claim, is ubiquitous in the sciences at every level. If explanation by functional analysis undermines reduction, then reduction is under- mined everywhere, in physics and chemistry as well as in economics, psychology, and biology. In this respect, then, there is nothing special about the mind: function- analytical explanations exhibit explanatory autonomy wherever they are found, and they are found everywhere in science, engineering, and everyday life. 1. The Nomic Conception of Science We set the stage for our position by showing how the pressure for reduction in science, and the conflation of explanatory adequacy and evidential adequacy, is an artifact of what we call the nomic conception of science: the idea that the content of science is a 2 Neuroscience, Psychology, Reduction, and Functional Analysis Martin Roth and Robert Cummins
- 45. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi 30 MARTIN ROTH AND ROBERT CUMMINS collection of laws, together with the deductive-nomological model of explanation. NCS, in effect, identifies explanation with reduction, thus making no room for the explanatory autonomy of function-analytical explanations. NCS has two easily recognizable and internally related components: (1) The content of a science is captured by its laws. The various sciences are indi- viduated by their theories, and a theory is a collection of laws expressed in a proprietary vocabulary. Thus, ultimately, the content of a science is captured by a set of laws.1 (2) Scientific explanation is subsumption under law. According to the deductive- nomological (D-N) account of explanation (Hempel and Oppenheim, 1948), the explananda of science are events and laws. Explanation of an event is accomplished by deducing its occurrence from laws and initial conditions. Explanation of a law is accomplished by deducing it (or a close approximation) from more basic laws and boundary conditions. From the perspective of NCS, the sciences form a reduction hierarchy to the extent that the laws of one science can be deduced from the laws of another science.2 For example, if the laws of chemistry can be deduced from the laws of physics, then chem- istry reduces to physics, and physics is “below” chemistry in the hierarchy (Figure 2.13 ). Reduction is just D-N applied between sciences, and for those in the grip of NCS, the goal of unifying science became the goal of providing between-science deductions (Oppenheim and Putnam, 1958). A notable feature of D-N is that, given its deductive structure, the explanations it generates are transitive. For example, if there are laws L1 and L2 such that L2 subsumes L1 , and if L1 subsumes event E, then L2 subsumes event E. If we accept the NCS account of reduction sketched above, it follows that if there is some event that is subsumed by thelawsofpsychologybutisnotsubsumedbythelawsofneuroscience,thenpsychology does not reduce to neuroscience. When we put the matter this way, it should be clear why the conventional wisdom is that functionalism in psychology blocks the reduction of psychology to neuroscience (Kim, 1993; Fodor, 1998).4 According to functionalism, psychology discloses nomic connections between functional states. If functional states are multiply realized (e.g., if some instantiations of functional states 1 This view has been with us since Newton, and the way many of the major debates in twentieth-century philosophy of science were framed—debates over scientific confirmation and explanation, for example— make little sense without it (e.g., Nagel, 1961; Carnap, 1966; Hempel, 1966). 2 Early formulations required bridge principles for the derivation (Nagel, 1949; 1961). Churchland (1979) provided a formulation that required only that the reducing theory generate a reasonable image of the reduced theory. 3 There are some evident difficulties: Where does geology go? Is astronomy part of physics? Is sociology on the same “level” as economics? Is developmental psychology more or less basic than cognitive psychology? What is the relationship between evolutionary biology and zoology (or any other part of biology)? We propose to leave these (embarrassing) questions aside for the time being. A fuller treatment of these issues can be found in Causey (1977) and Wimsatt (2006). 4 Of course, unlike Fodor, Kim challenges the conventional wisdom.
- 46. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, REDUCTION 31 are not instantiations of biological states), then the laws of psychology subsume events that are not subsumed by the laws of neuroscience, and so the reduction of psychology to neuroscience fails. Similarly, if nomically distinct biological states can realize the same psychological state then, once again, the laws of psychology will fail to reduce to the laws of neuroscience. Psychology, in this case, will be autonomous from neuroscience. If we take seriously the idea that laws of psychology subsume events not subsumed by laws of neuroscience, then there is something wrong with the hierarchy presented inFigure2.1.Theproblemisn’tmerelythatthehierarchyfailstobeareductionhierarchy, for that hierarchy is committed to the idea that if the laws of a science subsume some event, then laws of the sciences below also subsume that event. The aforementioned considerations of multiple realization purport to show that laws of psychology do not stand in this relation to laws of biology, however, so the argument from multiple realization would require us to abandon the idea that biology is “below” psychology. Nonetheless, accepting the argument from multiple realization does not require that we abandon the spirit of the hierarchy. Reductions require type–type identities, but functionalists can opt for the weaker claim that each token of a psychological state type is identical to a token of some physical state type or other. This would preserve the idea that any event subsumed by the laws of psychology is subsumed by some physical law or other, so failure of reduction would be compatible with the claim that physics is more basic than psychology (Fodor, 1974). However, if the explanatory contribution of an unreduced, “higher-level” law is simply the set of events it subsumes, it is not obvious that embracing token–token identities (without type–type identities) helps the defender of autonomy. After all, if physical lawssubsumeanyeventthatunreducedlawsofpsychologysubsume,itseemstofollow that physical laws can explain any event explained by unreduced laws of psychology. But if that is so, then unreduced psychological laws are gratuitous. Thus the challenge to the defender of autonomy is to show that non-reduced, higher-level laws come with explanatory benefits not enjoyed by lower-level laws. Of course, defenders of auton- omy do think that higher-level laws enjoy such benefits: the explanations provided by Economics Psychology Biology Chemistry Physics Reduction Figure 2.1 Reduction hierarchy
- 47. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi 32 MARTIN ROTH AND ROBERT CUMMINS higher-level laws are more general than the explanations provided by lower-level laws.5 Even if generality is not the only explanatory virtue, the defender of autonomy seems to be on firm ground in claiming that it is a virtue reserved for explanations that invoke higher-level laws. Following Sober (1999), we can think of the choice between higher- and lower-level explanations as involving a trade-off between breadth and depth. Here is how Sober puts the point: The goal of finding “relevant” laws cuts both ways. Macro-generalizations may be laws, but there also may be laws that relate micro-realizations to each other, and laws that relate micro- to macro- as well. Although “if P then Q” is more general than “if Ai then Bi,” the virtue of the micro-generalization is that it provides more details. Science aims for depth as well as breadth...Returning to Putnam’s example, let us imagine that we face two peg-plus-board sys- tems of the type that he describes. If we opt for the macro-explanation of why, in each case, the peg goes through one hole but not the other, we will have provided a unified explanation. We will have explained similar effects by describing similar causes. However, if we choose a micro- explanation, it is almost inevitable that we will describe the two systems as being physically different, and thus our explanation will be disunified. We will have explained the similar effects by tracing them back to different types of cause. Putnam uses the terms “general” and “invari- ant” to extol the advantages of macro-explanation, but he might just as well have used the term “unified” instead. (pp. 550–1)6 Here we find an interesting twist: While multiple realization blocks the kind of unity that between-science deductions were supposed to provide (reduction), it turns out that higher-level laws provide a kind of unity—unity-as-generality—that depends on multiple realization. On this view, the explanatory virtue of higher-level laws depends on actual multiple realization, as opposed to merely possible multiple realization. If the states picked out by higher-level laws are not multiply realized, then the generality provided by higher-level laws would be no greater than the generality provided by lower-level laws. And because explanations given in terms of lower-level laws provide depth (in Sober’s sense, i.e., provide micro-details), lower-level explanations would always emerge as superior: equivalent breadth and more depth. This is why reductive explanations are so appealing in the first place. While the above story about reduction, multiple realization, and autonomy may be intuitively compelling, we think it is deeply flawed. As we will argue in Section 3, the autonomy of functional explanation does not depend on actual multiple realization, and while functional explanations may in fact exhibit the kind of generality that is thought to apply to higher-level laws, the primary virtue of functional explanation 5 See Pylyshyn (1978) for an early expression of this idea. 6 Sober understands “unified explanation” in the sense of Kitcher (1989). According to Kitcher, “Science advances our understanding of nature by showing us how to derive descriptions of many phenomena, using the same pattern of derivation again and again, and in demonstrating this, it teaches us how to reduce the number of facts we have to accept as ultimate” (p. 423). Macro-explanations unify in that macro-explanations allow us to reduce the number of patterns used to explain phenomena.
- 48. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, REDUCTION 33 is not its generality. To set the stage for our argument, consider the following passage from Putnam (1975), as well as Sober’s response to it. Putnam writes: Even if it were not physically possible to realize human psychology in a creature made of anything but the usual protoplasm, DNA, etc., it would still not be correct to say that psychological states are identical with their physical realizations. For, as will be argued below, such an identification has no explanatory value in psychology. (p. 293) Sober calls Putnam’s remark “curious” (1999, p. 549) and notes the following: If we take Putnam’s remark seriously, we must conclude that he thinks that the virtue of higher-level explanations does not reside in their greater generality. If a higher-level predicate (P) has just one possible physical realization (A), then P and A apply to exactly the same objects. Putnam presumably would say that citing A in an explanation provides extraneous information, whereas citing P does not. It is unclear how this concept of explanatory relevance might be explicated. (p. 549) Viewed though the lens of NCS, Putnam’s remark is curious. Because NCS must iden- tify any explanatory bonus yielded by psychological laws with breadth, NCS weds the autonomy of psychology to actual multiple realization. Yet Putnam appears to be claiming that psychological explanations would be autonomous even if psychological states were not actually multiply realized. We think Putnam is right, but it is impossible to see why he is right from an NCS perspective. When we replace NCS with something more descriptively accurate, however, we find that the kind of explanatory autonomy Putnam was gesturing at is ubiquitous in the sciences. Moreover, the fact that the autonomy in question is ubiquitous is important. The autonomy of psychology suggests that there is something sui generis about the mind. An autonomy that lives in every science, at all levels, raises no such specters. 2. The Inadequacy of NCS Whenpressed,itishardtocomeupwiththelawsofeconomics,psychology,biology,or chemistry as these are envisaged by NCS: a small set of principles whose applications constitute the business of the field. There are some examples, of course: the law of supply and demand, the law of effect, the Hardy-Weinberg law, Dalton’s law of multiple proportions. But the positivist dream of an autonomous axiomatic presentation of these sciences is pretty clearly a pipe dream. The would-be reductionist, therefore, must assume that this is simply a reflection of the relatively undeveloped state of the super-physical sciences, an assumption that effectively legislates how these sciences should be structured without bothering with how they actually are structured.7 If this legislation could be made to stick—if we were to refuse to count psychology as science, 7 This is not to say that accounts of science should aim for descriptive adequacy only; the point, rather, is that we should be suspicious of accounts of science that rule out what is pre-theoretically taken to be obviously good science.
- 49. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi 34 MARTIN ROTH AND ROBERT CUMMINS ora“maturescience,”untilithadanexpressionasasetoflaws(aregrettablywidespread tendency for decades)—NCS would be made true by fiat, and a major requirement of the reductionist program would, in turn, be guaranteed by that fiat. There would be considerable collateral damage as a result, of course: no actual science would count as science.Sincetruthbyfiatshouldnotbeattractivetothosesympathetictothescientific enterprise, a revision of NCS would seem to be in order. We can go some distance along this path by distinguishing laws and effects. In science, when a law is thought of as an explanandum, it is called an “effect” (Cummins, 2000). Einstein received his Nobel Prize, not for his work on relativity, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. In psychology, laws are almost always con- ceived of, and generally called, effects, though they are sometimes called laws as well. We have the Garcia effect (Garcia and Koelling, 1966), the spacing effect (Madigan, 1969), the McGurk effect (MacDonald and McGurk, 1978), as well as the Law of Effect (Thorndike, 1905) and Emmert’s Law (Emmert, 1881). Each of these is a fairly well- confirmed law or regularity (or set of them). But no one thinks that the McGurk effect explains the data it subsumes; i.e., no one not already in the grip of the deductive- nomological model would suppose that one could explain why someone hears the consonant that a speaker’s mouth appears to make by appeal to the McGurk effect. That just is the McGurk effect. To distinguish the sense of “effect” that applies to events from the sense of “effect” that applies to laws or regularities, we will call the latter “R-effects” (short for “regularity-effects”).8 Science sometimes focuses on explaining individual events—e.g., the extinction of the dinosaurs is explained by appeal to the global dust cloud that formed when a large meteorite struck Earth. But, more often, and more fundamentally, it is focused on the explanation of R-effects. Contrary to the deductive-nomological account of explanation, R-effects themselves do not explain the states and events they subsume. They simply specify regularities. An R-effect is an explanandum, not an explanans.9 Treating the “higher” or “special” sciences as collections of R-effects frees one from the burden of finding a unified, subsumptive nomic structure for every candidate science, and this makes room for the idea that it might be sensible to ask, e.g., whether chemistry reduces to physics, since it underwrites the idea that chemical R-effects might be subsumed under the laws of physics without assuming that chemistry can be organized as a unifying set of laws. It leaves unsettled, however, the question of how we are to think, for example, of the relationship of biological R-effects to chemical R-effects. The unity of science, as usually conceived, presupposes the unity of the 8 We omit the prefixes in contexts in which the sense is obvious, as in “photo-electric effect” and “the accident was an effect of the blowout.” 9 We agree that one can explain why Wilbur thought the sound he heard was the one Oscar’s mouth appeared to be making by appeal to the McGurk effect, and that this is straightforward subsumption under causal law. But this is explanatory only if you do not know about the McGurk effect. In that case, you now understand that what you witnessed is not an anomaly, but what is to be expected.
- 50. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, REDUCTION 35 individual sciences. The conception now under consideration requires only the unity of (basic) physics. But this conception seems to vastly understate the organization and internalcomplexityofthespecialsciences,whileatthesametimemakingthe“principles” of the science immediately below the reductive target look like poor candidates for a reductive base, since those principles themselves appear as a mere bundle of R-effects when viewed from below. Therearetwoconclusionswewanttodrawfromallthis.First,NCSisnotdescriptive fact, but an ideal generated by an outmoded conception of scientific theories as the deductive closure of a small set of sentences, and conceived explicitly to partner with some version of the deductive-nomological model of explanation and its offspring. Second, the hierarchy of the sciences is also not descriptive fact, but an ideal generated by a combination of NCS and the corresponding flavor of reductive aspirations engendered by the dream of unified science. We need a conception of the sciences that does justice to their internal organization and to their “continuity” (or lack thereof) with the rest of science as a whole. NCS and the reductionist hierarchy that goes with it was an attempt to deliver these goods, but that conception is now widely recognized as deeply flawed. We need to abandon NCS. But how should we think about explanation, reduction, autonomy, and hierarchy once we do so? The answer depends, to a large extent anyway, on a proper understanding of functional analysis. 3. Functional Analysis When we identify something functionally—a mousetrap, a gene, a legislature—we identify it in terms of what it does. Many biological terms have both a functional and an anatomical sense: an artificial heart is a heart by function but is not an anatomical heart, and cognitive neuroscience was conceived when “brain” became a functional term as well as an anatomical one. Functional analysis is the attempt to explain the properties of complex systems—especially their characteristic R-effects—by the analysis of a systemic property into organized interaction among other simpler systemic properties or properties of component subsystems (Cummins, 1975, 1983). This explanation-by-analysis is functional analysis because it identifies analyzing properties in terms of what they do or contribute, rather than in terms of their intrinsic constitutions. For example, a circuit diagram describes or specifies a circuit in a way that abstracts away from how the components, including the “wires,” are actually made. The strategy of explaining R-effects—the properties of complex systems—by functional analysis is ubiquitous in science and engineering, and by no means special to psychology.10 10 In addition to Einstein’s analysis of the photoelectric effect, we find Mendel’s analysis of inheritance patterns in plants, Helmholtz’s analysis of Emmert’s Law, and Newell and Simon’s analysis of problem
- 51. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi 36 MARTIN ROTH AND ROBERT CUMMINS From the point of view of functional analysis, functional properties are dispositional properties, and the dispositional properties of a complex system are explained by exhibiting their manifestations as the disciplined manifestation of dispositions that are components of the target disposition, or by the disciplined interaction of the dis positionsof thesystem’scomponentparts.The explanatory targetsof thissortof analysis typically are not points in state space (particular events) or trajectories through it (particular sequences of events). Rather, the usual aim of this kind of analysis is to appeal to a system’s design in order to explain why one finds the trajectories one does and not others. The design provides a model of the state space and constrains the possible paths through it, thereby explaining the system’s characteristic R-effects. More generally, the explanandum of a functional analysis is a dispositional property, and the strategy is to understand the dispositional properties of a complex system by exhibiting the abstract functional design of that system—to show, in short, that a system with a certain design is bound to have the (typically dispositional) property in question. Designscandothisbecausefunctionaltermspickoutthecausalpowersthatarerelevant to the capacity being analyzed. Functional terms are in this sense causal relevance filters: by selecting from the myriad causal consequences of a system’s states, processes, or mechanisms those that are relevant to the target R-effect, functional characterization makes the contributions of those states, processes, or mechanisms transparent. It is precisely this transparency that enables us to understand why anything that possesses these states, processes, or mechanisms is bound to have the R-effect in question. Without this filtering, we are simply left with a welter of noisy detail with no indication of what is relevant and what is a mere by-product of this or that implementation.11 Causal relevance filtering is, therefore, just abstraction from the implementation details that are irrelevant to the achievement of the targeted R-effect. Implementations thatdifferinthosedetailsbutretainthedesignwillthusallexhibitthetargetedR-effect. In this way, the possibility of multiple realization is an inevitable consequence of causal relevance filtering, and so it should come as no surprise to find that functional analyses subsume causal paths that have heterogeneous implementations. It would, however, be a mistake to wed the explanatory power of functional analysis to assumptions about actual multiple realization, for even if there is only one nomo- logically possible way to implement a design, giving implementation details that go beyond what is specified by an analysis adds nothing to the explanation provided by thedesign.Forexample,supposethereisjustonenomologicallypossiblewaytoimple- ment a doorstop—say, by being a particular configuration of rubber. In this case, it would be plausible to hold that being a doorstop—the type—is identical to being a particular configuration of rubber—the type. Because type–type identities give you solving (to name just a few historical examples). In engineering, design specification is almost always functional analysis (e.g., circuit diagrams in electrical engineering). 11 Roth and Cummins (2014). The claim here isn’t an evidential one; e.g., it isn’t a claim about how we discover causal structure in a system. The latter is important to confirming functional analyses, but it is important not to conflate confirmation with explanation. We come back to this point below.
- 52. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, REDUCTION 37 property reductions, being a doorstop would thus reduce to being a particular configuration of rubber. But a functional analysis that specifies something as a doorstop would still be autonomous, in the following sense. Being a particular config uration of rubber comes with any number of causal powers. One of those powers is stopping doors, and in the context of the imagined functional analysis, stopping doors is the only causal power of this particular configuration of rubber that matters to having the target R-effect. If we replace “doorstop” with “rubber configured thus and so” in our analysis, we won’t lose anything as far as the causation goes. However, we will lose the transparency functional analysis affords unless we specify explicitly that stopping doors is the relevant causal power. But then the explanation is tantamount to the explanation given in terms of “doorstop”; i.e., the explanation does not give us anything beyond what is provided by the functional analysis itself. If we focus on the causal explanation of events and assume type–type identity, then framing explanations in terms of “doorstop” is guaranteed to give you nothing beyond what framing explanations in terms of “rubber configured thus and so” gives you, and this is why it has been generally assumed that reduction is incompatible with auton- omy. From the perspective of functional analysis, by contrast, autonomy can live with reduction. Design explanations are autonomous in the sense that they do not require “completion”byannexingimplementationdetails;e.g.,inthecaseimaginedabove,itis irrelevant to explaining the target R-effect whether a specific doorstop is a particular configuration of rubber. But design explanations are also autonomous in the sense that adding implementation details would undermine the transparency provided by causal relevance filtering and thereby obviate the understanding provided by the design. A doorstop may be a particular configuration of rubber, but replacing “doorstop” with “rubber configured thus and so” masks the information needed to understand why a system has the target R-effect. We think this is the lesson of Putnam’s passage, but the lesson is lost if we try to understand it as a lesson about causal explanations of events. 4. Horizontal vs. Vertical Explanation We are sympathetic to the thought that complete knowledge of implementation details would contribute to a fuller understanding of those systems whose R-effects are tar- geted by functional analysis. Indeed, such details are necessary for understanding how a system manages to have the very causal powers that are picked out by functional analysis. But having a fuller understanding of a system, in this sense, is not the same thing as having a more complete explanation of the R-effects targeted for functional analysis. For example, when we analyze the capacity to multiply numbers in terms of a partialproductsalgorithm,thespecificationofthealgorithmtellsusnothingaboutthe states, processes, or mechanisms of a system that implements the algorithm (except in the trivial sense that the states, processes, or mechanisms of any system that imple- ments the algorithm are sufficient for implementing it). However, as far as explaining the capacity goes—what we might call the “multiplication effect”—the analysis provided
- 53. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi 38 MARTIN ROTH AND ROBERT CUMMINS by the algorithm is complete, i.e., the analysis allows us to understand why any system that has the capacity for computing the algorithm ipso facto exhibits the multiplication effect. Generalizing, because details about how a design is implemented add nothing to the analysis, such details are irrelevant to the explanation of an R-effect. If you claim that the presence of a doorstop explains the fact that the door is open, you need to find some doorstop or other interacting with the door. Having found this, however, the fact that it is rubber rather than wood adds nothing to the explanation itself. The perspective we have outlined here suggests that we replace Sober’s distinction between breadth and depth—a distinction that really only makes sense within NCS— withadistinctionbetweenhorizontalandverticalexplanation.Horizontalexplanations explain R-effects by appeal to a design or functional analysis. They answer the question: Why does S exhibit R-effect E? Vertical explanations specify implementations. They answer the question: How is design D realized in S? Neither type of explanation is sub- sumption under law. And neither is in the business of explaining individual events. The explananda are, rather, R-effects (horizontal) and designs (vertical).12 We think the tendency to conflate explaining an R-effect via functional analysis with explaininghowafunctionalanalysisisimplementedhasledtoamisunderstandingcon- cerning the relationship between functional analysis and mechanistic explanation. Following Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2006), a mechanism “is a structure performing a function in virtue of its component parts, component operations, and their organiza- tion. The orchestrated functioning of the mechanism is responsible for one or more phenomena” (p. 162). As we see it, the goal of discovering and specifying mechanisms is often or largely undertaken to explain how the analyzing capacities specified by a functional analysis are implemented in some system. In this way, the horizontal explanations provided by functional analysis and the vertical explanations provided by specifying mechanisms complement each other. This view of the relationship is not without its challengers, however. For example, Piccinini and Craver (2011) argue that functional analyses are “mechanism sketches”: functional analyses and the design explanations they provide are “incomplete” until filled out with implementation details, and in that way, the explanations provided by functional analysis are not autonomous. However, we think their argument involves a misidentification of the relevant explanatory targets of functional analysis—R-effects— andacorrelativeconflationofexplanationandconfirmation. We’ll taketheseupinturn. Piccinini and Craver write that, “Descriptions of mechanisms...can be more or less complete. Incomplete models—with gaps, question-marks, filler-terms, or hand- waving boxes and arrows—are mechanism sketches. Mechanism sketches are incom- plete because they leave out crucial details about how the mechanism works” (p. 292). Sketches being what they are, we have no quarrel with the claim that mechanism 12 Note that vertical explanation tells us how a design is implemented in some system, not why a system implements the design(s) it does. The latter belongs to what Tinbergen (1958) called ultimate explanation. An ultimate explanation answers the question “Why does S have D?” by specifying a developmental, learning, and/or evolutionary history.
- 54. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/06/2017, SPi NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, REDUCTION 39 sketches are incomplete, and insofar as mechanistic explanations explain by showing how a mechanism works, we agree that filling in the missing details of a mechanism sketch can lead to a more complete mechanistic explanation. The crucial issue here, however, is whether functional analyses should be viewed as mechanism sketches. To motivate the claim that functional analyses are mechanism sketches, we have to assume that abstraction from implementation detail inevitably leaves out something crucial to the analytical explanation of a target R-effect, something that implementation details would provide. But as we’ve already argued, the opposite is in fact true; adding implementation details obfuscates the understanding provided by functional analysis. Instead of favoring the autonomy of functional analysis, however, Piccinini and Craver think that abstraction from implementation actually works against claims of autonomy. They write: Autonomist psychology—the search for functional analysis without direct constraints from neural structures—usually goes hand in hand with the assumption that each psychological capacity has a unique functional decomposition (which in turn may have multiple realizers). But there is evidence that...several functional decompositions may all be correct across different species, different members of the same species, and even different time-slices of an individual organism. Yet the typical outcome of autonomist psychology is a single functional analysis of a given capacity. Even assuming for the sake of the argument that autonomist psychology stumbles on one among the correct functional analyses, autonomist psychology is bound to miss the other functional analyses that are also correct. The way around this problem is to let functional analysis be constrained by neural structures—that is, to abandon autonomist psychology in favor of integrating psychology and neuroscience. (p. 285) We think this argument clearly conflates explanatory autonomy with confirmational autonomy. If a capacity admits of more than one analysis, merely providing an analysis will, of course, leave open the question of whether the analysis provided correctly describes how a system manages to have the capacity in question (assuming it does have the capacity). Knowledge of neural structures is undoubtedly relevant to settling the question of which analysis is correct, but bringing such knowledge to bear in this instance would be an exercise in confirming a proposed analysis, not explaining a capacity.13 Suppose there are two possible analyses, A and B, for some capacity C, and 13 We take this to be a clarification of the view expressed in Cummins (1983). He writes: “Functional analysis of a capacity C of a system S must eventually terminate in dispositions whose instantiations are explicable via analysis of S. Failing this, we have no reason to suppose we have analyzed C as it is instanti- ated in S. If S and/or its components do not have the analyzing capacities, then the analysis cannot help us to explain the instantiation of C in S” (p. 31). Finding an implementation is a condition of adequacy of a proposed functional analysis, but the condition is evidential: which functional analysis is instantiated in S? No sane person would deny the importance of this question to psychology, nor would any sane (non- dualist) person deny that neuroscience is relevant to answering this question. Complicating matters is the fact that distinguishing explanation from confirmation is not enough; we also need to distinguish horizontal and vertical explanations. A distinction along these lines is also at work in Cummins (1983): “Ultimately, of course, a complete property theory for a dispositional property must exhibit the details of the target property’s instantiation in the system (or system type) that has it. Analysis of the disposition (or any other property) is only a first step; instantiation is the second” (p. 31).
- 55. Exploring the Variety of Random Documents with Different Content
- 56. rained all the rest of the way back to Cetinje no evil results ensued to either of them. But the episode has become a legend of the lake, and two years after I heard an Albanian retailing it to an interested audience. The point of the story was the extreme cold-bloodedness of the English, as shown by the heartless way I laughed at my friend's misfortune! CHAPTER VII OF THE NORTH ALBANIAN The wild ass, whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver. The difficulty of the Eastern Question, as it is called, lies in the fact that it is not a question at all but a mass of questions, the answering of any one of which makes all the others harder of solution. Of all these, the Albanian question is the hardest to solve, and has not as yet received the attention that it calls for and will shortly compel. Few people in the West—none, I might almost say, who have not been to Albania—can realise that to-day in Europe there lives a whole race, a primeval lot of raw human beings, in a land that is not only almost entirely without carriageable roads, but in which in many cases the only tracks are even too bad for riding, the conditions of life are those of prehistoric barbarism, and the mass of the people have barely even attained a mediæval stage of civilisation. When the Albanian arrived in Europe none knows, and authorities differ as to his possible relationships with other people, but there is no I manner of doubt that he is the direct descendant of the wild tribes that were in the Balkan peninsula before the Greeks and before the Romans, and have been variously described as Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians, according to the part they inhabited. They are described as having been fierce fighters and very wild, and they furnished Rome with some of her best soldiers. Nor were they lacking in brain power; men of barbarian Balkan blood arose who ruled their conquerors and provided the Roman empire with a list of emperors that includes Diocletian and Constantine the Great.
- 57. Empires have risen and empires have passed away, and the Albanian has remained the same wild thing. The might of Rome waned; the Servian, the Venetian, and the Ottoman have followed in turn. Annexed but never subdued, the Albanian merely retired to the fastnesses of the mountains and followed the devices of his own heart, regardless of his so-called ruler. The Albanian of to-day is nominally under Turkish rule, but nominally only. The Albanian's position with regard to Turkey is a very peculiar one. The Turk, so his friends tell us, has many admirable qualities, but even those who love him best do not pretend that he has ever attempted to civilise, cultivate, or in any way improve the condition of, his subject races. Under the Turk all development is arrested, and nothing ripens. The Albanian, for the most part, remains at the point where he had arrived when the Turk found him, and except that he has adopted the revolver and breechloading rifle, he has not advanced an inch. He is the survival of a past that is dead and forgotten in West Europe. His language has troubled philologists considerably. It is a soft, not unpleasant-sounding tongue, full of double shshshes and queer consonant sounds; such queer ones that it fits no known alphabet, and he has never found out how to write it down. Quite recently several attempts have been made, mostly by foreigners, to tame this wild language to an alphabet, and three or four different systems have been evolved, all more or less unsatisfactory, as no alphabet unaided can cope with its peculiar sounds. One in which Roman letters are used and plentifully strewn with accents, both above and below, is the most favoured in North Albania, but the Turk does not allow Albanian as a school language, the mass of the people speak nothing else, and Albania remains a land without a literature, without a history, without even a daily paper. To possess and use an unwritten language in Europe in the twentieth century is no mean feat It carries one back to remote prehistoric times, confronts one with blank unwritten days, and suggests forcibly that the Albanian is probably possessed of raw primeval and perhaps better-left-unwritten ideas. Our search for the live antique cannot take us much further. But the Albanians, in spite of their antiquity, are incredibly young as a people, and blankly ignorant of the outer world. They are still in the earliest stage of a nation's life history, and have not yet advanced beyond the tribal form of life. At an early date—some say as early as the fourth century, but this seems doubtful—the Albanians became Christian. I have failed to discover what man or men succeeded in thus powerfully influencing this very conservative
- 58. people. It is a remarkable fact that, though all the other Christians of the Balkans early declared for the Eastern Church and all the Pope's efforts to reclaim them failed, the Christian Albanians of the North have remained faithfully Roman Catholic. The mountains of Albania, like those of Montenegro, are a series of natural fastnesses, among which a small army of attack is massacred and a large one starves. Moreover, a large part of the land was not worth the expense of taking. The tribes were exceedingly ferocious, and would have taken a great deal of conquering, but as they had no leader under whom they could combine and make organised attacks, they were not the danger to the Turks that the Montenegrins were. Moreover, the fact that they belonged to the Western and not to the Eastern Church prevented them from making common cause with the other Christian peoples. Once and once only were they on the point of obtaining recognised national existence, and this was under the leadership of the great Skender Beg. But Skender Beg died in 1467, and as yet no one has arisen capable of welding the semi-independent tribes into a solid whole. The Turks purchase peace from them by leaving them to do as they please among their mountains. The Albanians purchase privileges from the Turks by fighting for them and supplying the Turkish army, as they did formerly the Roman, with some of its best soldiers. And Albania to-day remains separated into a number of distinct tribes, which are governed by their own chieftains according to unwritten laws which have been handed down orally from a very remote past. The Turkish Government has practically no say in the matter. At any rate, what it says it has not the power to enforce. The Albanian is ignorant and untrained, but he is no fool. His one ruling idea has been to go on being Albanian in the manner of his fathers. He perceived quickly all the points that would enable him to do so, and he seized upon them. The mountain people in the more inaccessible parts retained their Christianity. The Albanians who swooped upon the plains vacated by the Serbs found it greatly to their advantage to profess Mohammedanism, and both Mohammedan and Roman Catholic were ready to make common cause against the Christians of the Eastern Church. So indispensable have the Albanians made themselves to the Turkish Government that it has been forced to concede to them every license, lest it should lose their support. Far from making any attempt at civilising them, it has never scrupled to make use of their savagery in warfare, and in warfare the Albanian can be exceedingly savage. Never from the beginning of time has he been taught anything that the Western world thinks necessary; never in the majority of cases has the
- 59. most rudimentary education come his way. His Mohammedanism and his Christianity he practises in an original and Albanian manner, and in his heart he is influenced mainly by traditional beliefs and superstitions which are probably far older than either. He purchased his freedom by making himself useful to the Turk, and the Turk has left him in the lowest depths of barbarism. The only schools that exist in the land are those of the Italian and Austrian Frati, and such civilisation as the Albanian possesses he owes to the labours of these devoted men. As for travelling and means of communication, it seems probable that the roads to-day are far inferior to what they were in the time of the Romans. And this is the land of the only one of her subject races with which Turkey has been friends. The deplorable state of Albania is an even stronger indictment against Turkish government than that of Macedonia. To-day the country is practically in a state of anarchy. Little or nothing is done in the way of cultivation; blood-feuds rage, and men are shot for quarrels that are family inheritances and originated for long-forgotten reasons in the dark ages. Human life is cheap, very cheap. An ordinary Englishman has more scruples about killing a cat than an Albanian has about shooting a man. Indeed, the Albanian has many of the physical attributes of a beast of prey. A lean, wiry thing, all tough sinew and as supple as a panther, he moves with a long, easy stride, quite silently, for his feet are shod with pliant leathern sandals with which he grips the rock as he climbs. He is heavily armed, and as he goes his keen eyes watch ceaselessly for the foe he is always expecting to meet. There is nothing more characteristic of the up-country tribesman than those ever- searching eyes. I have met him many a time in the Montenegrin markets, in the weekly bazaar in his capital, and on the prowl with his rifle far in the country. Up hill or down hill, over paths that are more like dry torrent beds, it is all the same to him; he keeps an even, swift pace, and he watches all the time. Dressed as he is, in tightly-fitting striped leg-gear and in a short black cape, his appearance is extraordinarily mediæval, and he seems to have stepped straight out of a Florentine fresco. His sash is full of silver-mounted weapons, he twists his tawny-moustache, and he admires himself exceedingly. He walks with a long rolling stride, planting his feet quite flat like a camel or an elephant—a gait which gives him an oddly animal appearance. His boldly striped garments, with their lines and zigzags of black embroidery, recall the markings of the tiger, the zebra, and sundry venomous snakes and insects. He seems to obey the laws that govern the markings of ferocious beasts; his swift, silent footsteps enhance the resemblance, and his colouring is protective; he disappears completely into a rocky background. The black patterns vary according to the tribe he hails from. If you ask his name, he
- 60. generally gives you his tribal one as well, and points over the mountains towards his district. He is So-and-So, for instance, of the Hotti or the Shoshi. Most men, whether Christian or Mohammedan, have their heads shaven; sometimes on the temples only, the rest of the hair standing out in a great bush; sometimes the entire head, with the exception of one long lock that dangles down the back. There are two distinct types of Albanians—a dark type with black hair, brown eyes, and clean-cut features, and a very fair type, grey or blue-eyed, taller and more powerfully built. To this class belong almost all the shaven-headed men with the dangling locks, a row of whom, squatting on their heels, look remarkably like a lot of half-moulted vultures. According to popular belief, the long lock is to serve as a handle to carry home the head when severed. A head, it seems, can be carried only by the ear, or by inserting a finger in the mouth, and this latter practice the owner of the head, when alive, objects to! But in spite of his wild-beast appearance and his many obvious faults, the Albanian is by no means all bad. I will almost say that he possesses the instincts of a gentleman. At any rate, he plays fair, according to his own very peculiar creed. He boasts that he has never betrayed a friend nor spared a foe. It is true that not sparing includes torture and various and most horrible atrocities, but it is a great mistake in considering any of the Balkan peoples to make too much capital out of atrocities. A century ago every race, including our own, considered the infliction of hideous suffering the legitimate way of punishing comparatively small crimes. At the risk of being laughed at, I will say that I do not believe the Albanian is by nature cruel. The life of the poor up-country peasant is hard and rough beyond what anyone who has only lived in a civilised country can realise, and the life of such a man's beasts is of necessity a hard one also. But though I have met him with his flocks on the hillsides and have watched him carefully in street and market, I have never seen the Albanian torturing an animal for the fun of the thing, as does the Neapolitan, the Provençal, and the Spaniard. The revolting jokes with lame and helpless animals which can be seen any day in the streets of Naples are not to be met with in the capital of the bloodthirsty Albanian.
- 61. MOUNTAIN ALBANIANS IN MARKET, PODGORITZA. I have trusted the Albanian somewhat recklessly, I have been told; I have given him plenty of chances of robbing me, and several of making away with me altogether; but he has always treated me with a fine courtesy, and has never taken a mean advantage. He is a brave man, and he is an intelligent man. When he gets the chance, he learns quickly and picks up foreign languages speedily. And when he succeeds in leaving his native land and escaping the awful blight of the Ottoman, he often shows great business capacity, and a surprising power of adapting himself to circumstances. The ordinary Christian Albanian of the town is very different from the up- country savage, and is a pathetically childish person. He tries very hard to be civilised, but his ideas on the subject are vague. How far he is from understanding the prejudices of the twentieth century the following conversation will show. It is one of many similar. I was walking up the steep, cobble-stony bazaar-street of Antivari late one afternoon in the summer of 1902. The shop owners stood at their doors to see me pass. Presently a man came forward, a tall, fair, grey-eyed fellow. He spoke very politely in a mishmash of Servian and Italian. I have never seen a foreign woman
- 62. before, he said, will you come into my shop and talk to me? I followed him into his shop. As I was unmistakably from the West, he gave me a tiny box to sit on, and then squatted neatly on the ground himself, called for coffee, and started conversation. He was amazed at my nationality, and showed me some cotton labelled Best hard yarn among his goods. Otherwise England conveyed no idea to him. England, having no designs on Albania, does not count much as a Power with the ordinary Albanian, but is merely something distant and harmless that does not matter, whereas an eye is kept on Austria and on Italy, and Russia is regarded with extreme suspicion. And you have come all this journey to see us! he cried. It is wonderful! I am a Christian Albanian. I am Catholic. Here he crossed himself vigorously to show that he really was, for in these lands your position in this world and the next depends mainly upon how this is done. Ah, but you should see Skodra! I told him I knew it well, and he beamed with pleasure. We discussed its charms and the unsurpassed magnificence of its shops. And it is in the hands of those devils the Turks. Ah, the devils! I came here eighteen years ago with my father, because this is a free land. Here all is safe, but it is a poor country. When I was a boy I was bad. I went to the school of the Frati, but I would not learn. Now I know nothing, and I speak Italian, oh, so badly! He rocked himself sadly to and fro with his big account-book on his knees. Son of the race with the worst reputation in Europe and born in one of Europe's worst governed corners, he lamented (as which of us has not done?) the lost chances of his youth and his lack of book-learning. To comfort him, I told him his people in Skodra had been very good to me. He cheered up. Why do you come here? he asked. Why do you not travel in my country? I said that I was told that it was a bad time and the country very dangerous. He considered the question earnestly, and looked me all over. Then he said seriously, No; my people are very good to women, they will not hurt you. But there is no government, so the bad people do what they like. There are some bad people; Turks, all Turks. But there is no fear. Truly they will take all your money, but they will not hurt you. That, he said simply, would not be honest. My people are all honest. You must not shoot a woman, for she cannot shoot you. Now with a man it is different; you must shoot him, or he will shoot you first. Also you cannot take his money if you do not shoot him first. To all of which points I agreed. Truly it is a misfortune, he continued, that there is no government. If we had only a king! Do you think you will have one? I asked. He chuckled mysteriously. The air just then was thick with rumours of a Castriot descendant of the Skender Beg family who at that very moment was reported
- 63. to be awaiting an opportunity for landing in Albania. Reports of his fabulous wealth were arousing much excitement in the breasts of his prospective subjects, but I fancy a rumour of their custom of shooting first must have reached his ears; for, so far, this middle-aged gentleman, whose life has been passed in Italian palazzos, has shown no hurry to take up his inheritance. My friend's ideas were vague and formless, and he could get no farther than a king for Albania and death to those devils the Turks. After a little more talk, I got up to say good-bye. But he insisted upon my having more coffee first. It is true that I am poor, he said, but I am not too poor to give two cups of coffee to one who has come so far to see us. Some day in your country you will see some poor devil from Skodra, and you will be good to him because his people are your friends. Nothing could exceed the grace with which he proffered hospitality to a stranger guest, but he saw no objection to robbery with murder if committed according to rule; and he prided himself on his Christianity. He shook hands with me very heartily. A pleasant journey, he said. Remember me when you meet a Skodra-Albanian in London. I shall never see you again—never, never. The sun was setting rather dismally, and with nikad, nikad (never) ringing in my ears and the gaunt ruins of the dead city before me, I felt quite as depressed as the Albanian. Truly the Albanian outlook is not a cheerful one. In the larger towns, where Turkish troops are quartered and there are plenty of Mohammedan officials, the Christians are in the minority, and their cowed manner makes it fairly obvious that they have a poor time. But the Christians of the mountains very much hold their own. The Mirdite tribe in the heights between the Drin and the coast is entirely Christian and one of the most fiercely independent. The town Christian who has picked up a smattering of education from the foreign Frati, has had a peep at the outside world and vaguely realises the blessings of life in a well-ordered land, sighs for some form of civilised government. Some have even told me that they wish to be taken by somebody—by Austria, or Italy, or you, or anybody. It could not be worse than it is now. But the mass of the people resent most fiercely the idea of any foreign interference, and cling fast to their wild and traditional manner of life. Whether Christian or Mussulman, the Albanian is intensely Albanian. A Christian will introduce you to a Mohammedan and say, He is a Turk, but not a bad Turk; he is good like me; he is Albanian. The Christian that the Albanian Mussulman persecutes is, as a rule, the Christian of another race. Between Christian and Mohammedan Albanian there is plenty of quarrelling, but then so there is between Christian and Christian, Mohammedan and Mohammedan. It is of the blood-feud, intertribal kind, played according to rule; for even in Albania it is possible, if the rules be not
- 64. observed, for killing a man to be murder. When a common enemy threatens, a bessa (truce with one another) is proclaimed, and they unite against him. The chief tribes in Northernmost Albania are the Hotti along by the Montenegrin frontier and by the lake; the Shoshi and the men of Shialla and of Skreli in the mountains above the plain of Skodra; the Mirdites in the mountains between the Drin and the coast; and the Klementi on the Montenegrin frontiers by Mokra and Andrijevitza. The Turks from time to time, when the Albanians have been more than usually lively, by various means (including treachery) have contrived to give the chieftains of one and another appointments in remote corners of Asia Minor, but with no results so far, except that the people, deprived of the only man who had any authority over them, became yet more unmanageable. Even the mildest of the town Christians takes a delight in pointing out in the bazaar the tobacco which has paid no duty and saying, We pay no tax for tobacco; we are Albanian, and we do not like to. The Turks have been unable to enforce this tax, and have to content themselves by searching the baggage that leaves the country and opening the hand-bags of tourists to prevent tobacco from leaving untaxed. The Albanians seldom do anything they do not like, and they are quick to object to any interference. Just now they have been objecting to reformation on Austro-Russian lines. The so-called reforms were the laughing-stock of everybody—Servian, Montenegrin, and Albanian—when I was out there last summer. For the Albanian's unreformedness has always been his chief attraction in Turkish eyes, and in order to give him every opportunity to behave in an unreformed manner, when the spirit moved him, the Turk in recognition of his services in the last war supplied the Albanian lavishly with weapons. Christians throughout the Turkish dominions have always been forbidden to carry arms. The Christian Albanian alone has this privilege. Every mountain man has firearms of some sort, many of them fairly modern rifles. It is one thing to give a man a gun and quite another to take it away from him. When the weapons were merely used upon the wretched unarmed Servian peasants in the plains of Old Servia, not a soul in any part of Europe save Russia paid the smallest attention; but when Stcherbina, the Russian Consul, fell a victim, it was a different matter, and the Turks found themselves in the unpleasant position of having either to offend Russia or to quarrel with their best allies. They proceeded to reform Albania on truly Turkish lines. They chased the Albanians out of the territory they had had no business to have swooped upon, and they arrested a few leaders as a matter of form. The Albanians were astonished and rather aggrieved, for they
- 65. had done very little more than they had always been given to understand they might do. Further interference might have alienated the Albanians altogether, but as for the sake of appearances and the reform scheme some non- Mohammedan officials had to be appointed, the Turks sent an Armenian and a Jew, called respectively Isaac and Jacob, to Skodra. Isaac and Jacob were shot in the main street in the day-time, and as far as I have heard their situations are still vacant. The affair caused some little amount of excitement, nevertheless the Albanians did not wish to resort to violence so long as the Government did not make itself disagreeable. There is an old tomb in Skodra, the last resting-place of some minor Mohammedan saint. Shortly after the deaths of Isaac and Jacob some mysterious writing was found upon the tomb. Though written in very ordinary charcoal, it was obviously of more or less divine origin, and the people anxiously waited the deciphering of the message. It proved to be merely a piece of a verse from the Koran conferring a vague blessing upon somebody. Allah be praised! said an old hodja, greatly relieved, it has not told us to go and shoot any more reformers! There were a great many more soldiers in Skodra than before. I asked several people the reason of this, in order to see what they would say. They one and all said, with a smile, The Turks want to reform Albania, but they are obliged to send the soldiers to the towns, because the people in the country do not like them! The town swarmed with soldiers. An officer rushed at my old guide, whom I was employing to interpret for me in the bazaar, and abused him in a loud voice till I interfered; a soldier seized and beat very severely a wretched little boy who begged of me, and my efforts on his behalf were of no avail; and these were all the results of the reforms that I saw or heard of in Skodra. But the idea seems gaining ground that the Albanian in the event of a war may cease to support a dying cause and elect to play a game of his own. When, as must inevitably be shortly the case, Macedonia is under a Christian governor, Albania will be yet more separated from the present seat of government (Constantinople), and the situation will become acute. I heard a good deal about the king that is to be. Many Serbs even expressed their opinion that the Albanians would be a great deal better if their independence were recognised; saying that at present they are responsible to no one; the Turk incites them to commit atrocities, and washes his hands of all they do; and that left to themselves the Albanians would develop into a fine people. That they have the makings of a fine people is probably true. That they are now capable of self-government is quite another thing. Unlike the other Balkan peoples, they have no past, no former empire. Their history is all
- 66. years that the locusts have eaten. What is to become of the Albanians? is one of the hardest of all the Eastern questions. Austria desires to have the answering of it. CHAPTER VIII SKODRA Skodra is the capital of North Albania. In our maps it is usually called Scutari— a name which causes it to be confused with the other and far better known Scutari on the Bosporus. In a French paper I once read an account of the Prince of Montenegro's palace on the Bosporus which described the Princes country place at Podgoritza, near the lake of Scutari. But the French seldom shine as geographers. Skodra can be reached from the port of St. Giovanni di Medua, at which a line of Lloyd steamers calls regularly. From thence a ride of nine hours, if you can find a horse, will take you by a very bad road to the town. But even from the Turks, who take a couleur-de-rose view of the resources of their land, I failed to learn that the route offered any attractions. It can also be reached by a steamer which, when there is enough water in the river, ascends the Bojana as far as Obotti, whence a barge will wobble you up to the town in an hour or thereabouts. By far the prettiest and pleasantest route is that from Cetinje by the lake. The Danitza, the chief vessel of the Montenegrin squadron according to the engineer, runs twice a week from Rijeka. It is a clean, tidy little boat built in Glasgow, and is very fairly punctual as to time. The sluggish stream meanders slowly in and out the hills; the channel of deep water serpentines through acres of water-lilies, white and yellow, whose leaves form a dense mat on the surface and a happy hunting-ground for the water birds—duck, moorhens, herons, spoonbills, and pelicans. It is a færie river, with the magic of the hills upon it, all silent save for the flap of the herons that rise as the boat glides past. Half choked with reeds and weeds which grow rankly luxuriant and rot in tangles, it tells of the making of the fertile lands of Montenegro, for the plains are all ancient lake beds from which the water has retreated. One hears without surprise that fever haunts the river in autumn, but, judging by the
- 67. healthy appearance of the folk of the neighbourhood, it cannot be of a very virulent type, and at no time of the year have I met with any mosquitoes. At the rivers mouth stand wretched shanties of rock and brushwood, the dwellings of the fisher-folk who reap, in the late autumn, a plenteous harvest. Vast shoals of small fish called scoranze rush up the lake from the sea, and are netted in such thousands that, dried and salted, they form one of Montenegro's chief exports.
- 68. STREET IN BAZAAR SKODRA. We pass the island of Vranina and glide out into the great green lake, leave the heights of Montenegro behind us, and see at the farther end the Accursed Mountains of Albania purple in the distance. The waters of the lake, according to the Albanians, are endowed with marvellous curative properties. You must drink of them for a month, and then, no matter what is your disease, you throw it all up, or else you die!—a severe kill—or—cure remedy upon which I have never experimented. We stop at Plavnitza and at Virbazar to pick up passengers, who come out in big canoes with long, upturned, pointed prows, and the deck is soon crowded with gay baggage and its strange owners, all of whom are usually anxious to make friends. You have only to show an interest in the women's babies and the men's weapons to secure entertainment for the rest of the voyage. Show the lady your new gun, said a tall Albanian to a youth. He passed over a Russian repeating rifle. A woman who was standing near hastily got out of the way. The Albanian
- 69. expressed contempt. It might go off, said the woman. Well, what if it did? laughed the Albanian. Look at me. I've been shot twice. It's nothing. Once I was hit here, he touched his shoulder; and the doctor cut out the ball with a knife, he added with great satisfaction. My brother died, said the woman briefly. So on, in leisurely fashion, till at the end of the lake we see the Crescent flying from an antiquated warship—the red flag and the dying moon that we falsely call the crescent, for it will never wax again. I confess that I never see it on the borders without a curious thrill. I was brought up to consider the Turk a virtuous and much injured individual. Now I never cross his frontier without hoping soon to be able to witness his departure from Europe. A shattered fortress frowns on the hill, a row of ramshackle buildings lines the shore, a filthy crowd fills the custom-house steps. Scutari— Albanese, Skodra at last. Time rolls back from the invisible boundary against which the centuries have beaten in vain, and before us lies the land of a prehistoric people and the life of past ages. Canoes big and little come paddling out in a scrambling hugger-mugger; Montenegro becomes, for the time being, a type of all that is most civilised in West Europe, and we leave it behind us on the steamboat. The custom-house is a dark den, in which everyone shouts at once and tumbles over everyone else. Smuggle your dictionary, if you have one, in an under pocket; there is no knowing, says the Turk, what a book in a foreign language may contain, so away with them all. There are few things more deadly. Passports are, or are not, asked for according to the amount of political tension. I have heard of two individuals who rushed that frontier by the aid of receipted bills, the stamps on which gave them a pleasingly official air, and have twice myself crossed the Turkish frontier when I hadn't ought. Anyone with an ounce of wits can, I believe. And really there is something to be said for a passport system that is warranted to exclude no one but the fools. The Persian who inspects the passports, on this occasion, merely asked for our names, which were too much for him. We gave him our visiting cards; he copied our Christian names letter by letter, then, exhausted by the effort, he added London as sufficient address, and the ceremony was complete. He is a humble youth, will accept twopence as bakshish, and
- 70. be your dog for a florin. Like most Turkish officials, he exists, I presume, on the pickings of his office. And the nation he loves the best in all Europe varies according to the nationality of the individual he is addressing. One gets used to arriving at Skodra as one does to most other things, but the first visit is an amazement. It will be some time before I forget that day when we emerged for the first time from that custom-house. The captain of the steamer ruthlessly whacked off all the would-be porters except one small boy, and bade him take us to the carriage stand. Off sped the boy like a hare, threading the mazes of the bazaar, dodging round corners and plunging down dark airless passages, his bare feet gripping the pavement, we following hard on his heels, dazzled by sun-spots, blinded in the darkness, confused by the unwonted sights, and slithering on the slippery cobblestones which slope down to the gutter in the middle where the pack-asses walk and the muck accumulates. Finally, after a ten minutes' chase, he halted us breathless on an open space on the farther side of the bazaar, stowed us into the remains of a peagreen fly, and accepted sixpence with gratitude. Off we rumbled down a lane that, but for its wayfarers, might be English, so familiar are its hedges, ditches, bramble and clematis, and we reached the residential part of the town and a decent hostelry in about twenty minutes. Skodra is not merely an interesting spot to visit from Cetinje; it also belongs rightly and properly to Servian history. From a very early period (it is said the seventh century) it formed part of the Servian territories, and it remained unconquered after the fatal battle of Kosovo. It was the capital of George Balsha, Prince of the Zeta, and was resigned by him into the hands not of the Turks, but the Venetians, traces of whose architecture yet remain in the town. Though more than once attacked, it was not taken by the Turks until 1479, and then only after a siege of six months. Now the Turk holds Skodra, the Albanian calls it his, and the Montenegrin has never forgotten that it once formed part of the great Servian Empire. According to the Albanian, it is the finest city in Europe, and when he tells you so he is proudly speaking what he believes to be the literal truth. To him it is an ideal spot, the model of what a capital should be, and the centre of his universe.
- 71. The Albanian may be caught young, and tamed; he may wander into far countries; he does a good trade in Rome; he may even live years in England; but for him a glory always hangs over the capital of his country. He is rare in London; there are only two or three of him, and he was hard to find. I tracked him to a far suburb, and when he learnt whence I had come his enthusiasm was unbounded. The greatness and magnificence of his country made it not at all surprising that the whole of Europe coveted it, and he gloried in the fact. Not that Russia, nor them Austria, nor nobody, he said, was going to have it! English mans silly mans; no understand my people. My people all one week like that; here he whirled his arms wildly round his head; next week go back work. Olright. War with Turks? No, ain't going to be none. Isn't the Turkish government a hard one? I asked. There ain't no government, said he gleefully. What about the taxes? Oo pay? said the Tame Albanian; you tell me that. Money, he admitted, had to be raised at intervals, but you always lived in hope that it would be raised in some other district, and if you displayed a proper amount of spirit it was. In the days of his youth he had fought for the Turks. I Bashi-bazouk, he said with pride; reg'lar army all them Mohammedans. I Catholic. I good Christian. I Bashi-bazouk. To us Bashi-bazoukdom and Christianity are odd yoke-fellows. To him, quite right and proper. Head of a flourishing business in London, and clad in a smart overcoat and a billycock hat, he sat down cross-legged on the floor, and his eyes sparkled as he thought of the good old Bashi-bazouk days. To London he came because, as everyone knows, there is lot of money in London. He knew no word of English and but little Italian; had scarcely any money; his entire stock in trade consisted of some native costumes and some silver filigree work. Failure would seem to have been inevitable, but the pluck and enterprise of the ex-Bashi-bazouk overcame all difficulties. You think my country wild country, said he; now I tell you—London; it big bad place. Five million peoples in London. My God, what a lot of criminals! In my country no man starve. He knock at door. 'What you want?' 'I hungry.' 'Olright, you come in.' He give him bread, he give him wine. In London you say, 'You git 'long, or I call a p'leece.' Wherever a Christian Albanian requires help, he has but to knock at the door of another Christian Albanian and say so. No payment is ever thought of. How should we live, said a man to me, if
- 72. we did not help one another? Compared with Albania, London, even now in the eyes of the ex-Bashi-bazouk, is a vast and uncivilised wilderness. Perhaps he is right. Nevertheless, he has found it an excellent place to get on in. His wife—my Albanian missus, as he called her—had, he confessed, a very poor time. Knowing no language but Albanian, and sighing always for the sun and the shores of the lake of Skodra, she was near weeping when she heard that I had just come from the beloved spot. She wore a red cap with coins round it, and a medal dangled in the centre of her forehead. She seemed singularly out of place in a London back-shop. By God, said her husband casually, I'm sorry for that pore fem'le! And he had a certain sympathy for her, in spite of his cheerful tone. Earth hunger, the fierce desire for a particular plot of ground, a plot which reason may point out to be barren, arid, lonesome, and in every way unlovable, but which is the cradle of the race, is and perhaps will always be one of the most unconquerable of human passions. The Tame Albanian says he means to end his days in the finest city in Europe, Skodra. It is not a salubrious spot. It is suffocating in summer and flooded in winter. It suffers from heavy rains, and lies low. Its one virtue is that it does not possess mosquitoes, but it makes up for this by being full of tuberculosis. Nevertheless, it grips one's imagination, it arouses the sleeping spirit of first one and then another long dead ancestor who lived in the squalid, glittering Middle Ages and before, and they point the way and they whisper, Such and such we did, and this also—do you not remember? and strange things that one has not seen before seem oddly familiar; three or four hundred years ago, they or something very like them were part of one's daily life. In the bazaar down by the river, with its maze of narrow crooked streets, its crazy wooden booths and its vile pavement, life goes on much as it did with us ages ago. Each trade has its own quarter, as in all Eastern bazaars. And narrow ways, called Mercery Street, Butchers' Row, Goldsmiths' Alley, in many an English town, still tell of the time when so it was in England, in days when timber was as cheap, streets as crooked and narrow, and pavement as bad as they are now in Skodra. And then in England, as now in Skodra, people wore colours—
- 73. red, blue, green, yellow—and those that could afford it were brave with embroideries. Their wants were few, luxuries there were few to be purchased, and they showed all their worldly goods upon their persons in a blaze of gold and finery on high days and holidays. Skodra does so still, and so does every peasant and many a nobleman in the old-world Balkan peninsula of to-day. Gorgeous garments solidly made they are, for they will not go out of fashion next season, nor the season after, never indeed until Albania is civilised, and when will that be? So the finery is made to last, and is worn and worn till it descends to Petticoat Lane and is bought by the very poor. And when the stitchery is all rubbed off by the friction of years, still the garment hangs together, and is worn until it finally drops off piecemeal in squalid rags. All these garments, however gorgeous without, are lined with coarse materials, often pieces that do not match patched together, for the Albanian ideas of dressmaking are old-world. The modern modiste has invented cotton and linen costumes lined with silk or satin. Her ancestress, however, acted on the Albanian plan, and the beautiful silk and brocade costumes that have come down to us from Elizabeths and Charles I.'s time are finished within with coarse and unsightly canvas. Near the entrance of the bazaar are the workshops of the carpenters, who make and carve great chests to hold the clothes, gaudy things painted peagreen and picked out with scarlet and gold, degenerate descendants of the beautifully carved and coloured chests in which all Europe kept its clothing in Gothic and Renaissance days. The makers of the chests fashion, too, wonderful cradles, coloured in the same gay manner, and in them the babies are packed and slung on pack-saddles or on women's backs. In a land of rough travelling, a strong box in which to pack the baby is a necessity, and doubtless our ancestors used the solid oak cradles we know so well in a like manner. Any day in the bazaar is interesting, for the shopmen nearly all make their own goods. The gunsmiths fill cartridges all day long, for they are an article much in demand, repair rifles and revolvers, and fit fine old silver butts, gorgeous with turquoise or cornelian, on to modern weapons. The silversmith squats cross-legged on the floor with a tray of burning charcoal, some tweezers, a roll of silver wire, and a little box full of silver globules. He works silently, deliberately, with long, nimble fingers picking up the tiny globules and arranging them, snipping and twisting the little
- 74. bits of wire, building up and soldering with great dexterity the most effective designs—designs with sides that match, but are never quite symmetrical, like Natures own work, satisfying the eye in a way that no machine-made article ever will. However rough his workmanship, his idea is almost always good, and he produces daring effects with glass rubies and emeralds of the largest size. In work of this sort the Albanian excels. When he comes to larger constructions, his trick of working by eye and getting balance by instinct is not so successful; his rooms are all crooked, his houses out of the square. Perhaps this is the inevitable out- come of his odd-shaped mind. It is rumoured that three-sided rooms may be found in Skodra, for the simple reason that somehow the builders, owing to a nice confusion of angles, could not squeeze in a fourth wall. They are an honest, civil lot, these Skodra tradesmen; and though your money will probably fly from hand to hand and disappear round the corner, the change always comes back correctly in the end, and you pass the interval drinking coffee with the shop owner. If your purchases are many, he will kindly send out to buy a piece of common muslin in which to wrap them; for Skodra does not supply paper, and when you have bought a thing, conveying it away is your own affair. We in London are used to having paper included lavishly with the goods, but an old lady once told me that in her young days the fashionable drapers of London would lend linen wrappers to those who bought largely, and the said wrappers had to be returned next day. In this particular Skodra is not more than eighty or ninety years behind London. To see the bazaar in all its glory one must go on a Wednesday; that is bazaar day, and all the folk of the surrounding country flock thither. Which is bazaar day in London? I have been asked any number of times by Serb, Montenegrin, and Albanian. And Every day is bazaar day in London is the one thing that gives them any idea of London's size. The five million inhabitants, railway trains, electric lights, and so forth, are all quite beyond their ken; but bazaar every day stuns and dazzles them, and at once calls up a picture of vast crowds and illimitable wealth. On bazaar day Skodra is thronged with strange types— costumes bizarre, grotesque, wild and wonderful, and the road from an early hour is crowded with flocks, pack-animals and their owners. Flocks
- 75. as strange as their drivers, for the ram of the pattering drove of sheep is often dyed a bright crimson, and his horns instead of curling neatly round by the sides of his head are trained to stand up like those of an antelope with their tight twist pulled out to long spiral His fashion is an even older one than that of his masters, for we find the ram with the same head-dress in early Egyptian frescoes. For some of these people it is three, even four days' tramp down to the market from their mountain homes, and over the rough tracks the women carry incredibly heavy burdens; not only the bundles of faggots or hides that are for sale, but the baby in a big wooden cradle is tied on the top. The men march in front with their rifles and look after the flocks. Firearms have to be left outside the bazaar. It is true that a good number of people are still privileged to carry them, but I have haunted the bazaar quite alone so often that I have ceased to believe in the many blood-curdling tales about its murderous possibilities with which travellers are usually favoured. Nor, when you once know your way, do I think any guide or kavass necessary. It is very dull with a kavass, for no one comes to play with you. I tried it once for an hour or so, and never again. But though you see no murders, you may see cases where apparently vengeance has been satisfied with mutilation, and meet a man whose nose has been cut off so lately that a bloodstained rag covers the vacancy. And the mountain-man swaggers up to the cartridge shop and fills the many spaces that have occurred in his belt since last he came to market.
- 76. SKODRA. I have no space to describe the dresses of the various tribes; the women with stiff, straight, narrow skirts boldly striped with black that recall forcibly the dresses upon the earliest Greek vases; the great leathern iron-studded belts; the women with cowries in their hair; the wild men from the mountains in huge sheepskin coats with the wool outside; town Christian women blazing in scarlet and white, masses of gilt coins, silver buttons and embroidery; Mohammedan ladies shapeless in garments which may be correctly termed bags, or to be still more accurate, undivided trousers, of brilliant flowered material, not only thickly veiled but with blue and gold cloth cloaks clasped over the head as well, shrouding the figure and allowing only a tiny peephole through which to see; poor women, veiled down to the knees in white, looking like ghosts in the dark entrances; Turks in turbans, long frock-coats and coloured sashes; little girls their hair dyed a fierce red and their eyebrows blackened. They all unite in one dazzling and confused mass
- 77. which one only disentangles by degrees, and when I plunged for the first time into that unforgettable picture, saw the blaze of sunlight, the dark rich shadows, the gorgeousness, the squalor, the glitter, the filth, the colour, the new-flayed hides sizzling in the sun and blackened with flies, the thousand and one tawdry twopenny articles for sale on all hands, I thought with a pang of the poor Albanian fem'le who was passing weary, colourless hours in a grey London suburb, and understood the sickness of her soul. Of all the old-world things in the town—older than the neatly cut flints for the flintlocks that are still in use, older than the tight mediæval leg- gear—the loose tunic bound round the waist by a sash and the full drawers tied round the ankle, as worn by the common Mohammedan men and boys of the town (a very ordinary dress throughout the East) is the oldest. It is the dress of the men on the early Greek vases; of the Dacians on Trajan's column; of the captive Gauls in the Louvre; the dress, in short, of all the barbarians, the braccati of the Romans. The Romans and the toga and the chlamys are all gone, and here, in the same old place, the barbarians are cutting their skirts and trousers on the same old pattern, and are very fairly barbarous still. But they have learned to shave their heads and to wear a white fez, and with this modification we at once recognise them as our old friend Pierrot, whose history points to the fact that he really did come from the Near East. Venice held all the Dalmatian coast and part of Albania. Venice was the home of masques and pantomimes, and among the existing prints of the pantomime characters is one Zanne in the familiar Pierrot dress. What more likely than that the fool of the piece should be represented as a boor from a conquered province? To this day, in so-called civilised towns, an unhappy foreigner is still apt to be considered a fair butt by the lower classes. Zanne came to England, and figures among the sketches for one of Ben Jonson's masques. Skirts with us are purely feminine garments, but the skirt of the barbarian has grown in Albania into a vast unwieldy kilt, and the Mohammedan Bey swaggers about in a cumbrous fustanella which reaches down to his ankle and sticks out like an old-fashioned ballet- girl's skirt. He cannot work because he wears the fustanella, and it is said that he wears the fustanella in order to be unable to work. Forty 1
- 78. metres of material go to this colossal and ridiculous garment. The greater part of the fulness is worn in front, and sways clumsily from side to side as the wearer walks. The Greeks adopted it in a modified form, but it must be seen on an Albanian to realise its possibilities. The Albanians have rarely, as yet, succeeded in doing anything in moderation. After seeing what the men were capable of in the skirt line, I was not surprised that the shepherd-folk out on the plains began by asking my guide with great interest if I were a man or a woman. But we must leave the bazaar, though many days do not exhaust its interests; leave the butchers' quarter, a harmony in pinks and blood-red, where the dogs lap red puddles, the butcher wipes a wet knife across his thigh, and the people run about with little gobbets of mutton for dinner, a fiercely picturesque place sicklied with the smell of blood; leave the Petticoat Lane of Skodra, where the cast-off finery of Albanian ladies and the trappings of beauty are displayed alongside heaps of the most hopeless rags. Aged crones as antique as their wares squat upon the ground. The sunlight blazes on the gold stitchery till it sparkles with its pristine splendour; the hag in charge of it, Atropos-like, points out its beauties with a large pair of shears, while Lachesis spins a woollen thread alongside. I vow they are the Fates themselves selling the garments of their victims. By the afternoon the crowds of country-folk are already reloading the pack-animals, decked with blue bead headstalls and amulets to keep off the evil eye, that await them at the entrance of the bazaar, where the gipsy smiths and tinkers work, half stripped, a-ripple with tough muscle, under little shanties made of sticks and flattened-out petroleum cans. How the land got on before the petroleum can was introduced it is hard to imagine. In the hands of the gipsies it is the raw material from which almost everything is made. The peasants load their beasts—they are adepts at pack-saddling and you rarely see a sore back—and trail slowly across the plains towards their mountain homes. The bazaar is shut up, darkness comes on fast, and belated foot passengers pick their way with lanterns. Night in Skodra is uncanny. The half-dozen tiny oil lamps do not light it at all. When there is no moon, the darkness is impenetrable and
- 79. absolute, save perhaps for a long streak of light from the door-chink of the next shop and the lighted windows of the mosque opposite. The black silhouettes of praying figures rise and fall within them, but the mosque itself is swallowed up in the surrounding blackness. A spark appears on the roadway, someone passes with a lantern and disappears. The street is dead still till a sword clanks and the patrol marches past. The lights are extinguished in the mosque. The darkness is dense and dead, and there is no sound. It is only nine o'clock, but all Skodra seems asleep. Skodra the town, as distinguished from the bazaar, has not a great deal to show. It is a big town with some 40,000 inhabitants, and as all houses of any size stand in a large yard or garden, it covers much space. Here every man's house is his castle, and the high walls are not only for seclusion but for defence. Skodra, from time to time, receives a rumour that thousands of armed men are marching upon it. All the shops are shut, the guards are doubled on the bridges, and folk shut themselves in their houses. The phantom army does not appear, and in two or three days things are going on as before. But it will come some day, said a man, when I laughed about a reported army of forty thousand that had never turned up. The Mohammedan quarter has the air of being far more wealthy and high-class than the Christian. The houses that one gets a glimpse of through the gateways are large and solid. But the streets are lonesome and deserted. Now and then I met a couple of veiled ladies, who, if no man were in sight, usually strove hard to make my acquaintance, and partially unveiled for the purpose. But as I know neither Turkish nor Albanian, we never got farther than the fact that I was a Frank and a deal of smiling and nodding. Two in particular walked a long way with me, chattering all the time, and for the benefit of the inquisitive, I must say that they were both very pretty girls. In Skodra not only the Mohammedan but the town Roman Catholic women go veiled, though the country-folk do not, and until married are often kept in a seclusion which to our ideas is little short of imprisonment—facts which throw a strong light upon the unlovely state of society which has made them necessary; for the etiquettes of society are usually based upon raw and unpleasant truths. It is idle folly to ascribe Western and twentieth-
- 80. century ideas to these primitive people, but the fact remains that the life of the average Albanian woman is an exceedingly hard one. That of the country-folk is a ceaseless round of excessive physical toil; that of the poorer town woman is, I am told, often spent at the loom from morning till night—labour that only ends when the Black Fate snips her thread. MOSQUE, SKODRA. Though the Mohammedans far outnumber the Christians in the town, the mosques are all small plain buildings, only saved from ugliness by the elegance of their tall slim minarets, nor are there many of them. With a grotesque lack of a sense of the fitness of things, the Turkish army, when it has a washing-day, uses the largest graveyard as a drying-ground, and a shirt or a pair of drawers flaps on each tombstone. It was not until I saw this sight that I had any idea that the Turkish soldiers ever had a washing-day. A lean, unkempt, ragged lot of poor dirty devils with scowling faces, they look more as if returning from a disastrous campaign than as if quartered in the barracks of the capital. And the sight of them is enough to make one have no difficulty in believing the tale that they not unfrequently help themselves to mutton from across the frontier when the Government is discreetly gazing in another direction. Their powers of endurance in war-time are not surprising when their life during peace is taken into consideration. A
- 81. fight in which you may loot all you want must be a pleasant holiday by comparison. The Christian quarter of Skodra looks less flourishing, and there are crosses on some of the doors, otherwise the two quarters are much the same. The Roman Catholic townsfolk wear a special costume. That of the men is odd; that of the ladies perhaps the most hideous that has been ever devised. Their gigantic trouser-petticoats of purple-black material, in multitudinous pleats, fall in an enormous bag that sticks out all round the ankles, and impedes the wearer to such an extent that she often has to hold it up with both hands in front in order to get along. With her face veiled and the upper part of her body covered with a scarlet, gold-embroidered cloak with a square flap that serves as a hood, she forms an unwieldy, pear-shaped lump—grotesque and gorgeous. The streets here are apt to be flooded in wet weather, and the side walks are high. Big blocks of stepping-stones, like those at Pompeii, afford a way over the road, nor do carts seem to find any difficulty in passing them.
- 82. SHOP IN BAZAAR, SKODRA. The cathedral of the Roman Catholics is a large brick building, some fifty years old, with a tall campanile, standing in grounds which are surrounded by a high wall. Its great blank interior, owing to lack of funds, has not suffered much from decoration. At the gateway the women loosen their veils and go into God's house with uncovered faces —beautiful faces, with clean-cut, slightly aquiline noses, clear ivory skins, red lips, and dark eyes with long lashes. There are benches in the nave, but a large proportion of the congregation, especially the country- folk who crowd in on feast days, prefer to sit on the floor; they spread a little rug or handkerchief, kick off their shoes and squat cross-legged on it as in a mosque; women with their breasts covered with coins that glitter as they sway to and fro in prayer; mountain-men with their cartridge belts upon them ready for use against a brother Albanian. A fine barbaric blaze of colour, scarlet and scarlet and scarlet again. The service begins; harshly dissonant voices, loud and piercing, chant the
- 83. responses; and the deep sonorous voice of the young Italian at the altar rings out like the voice of civilisation over the barbaric yowling of the congregation. As he mounts the scarlet and gold pulpit there is a hush of expectation. The sermon, in Albanian, is a long one, and the crowd hangs breathless on his words. His delivery and his action are simple and dignified, and I watch him sway his congregation with deep interest, though I can understand no word. He is working up to a climax, and he reaches it suddenly in a sentence that ends in the only non-Albanian word in the sermon, Inferno. The word thunders down the church on a long-rolled rrrr, and he stands quite silent, grasping the edge of the pulpit and staring over the heads of the people. There is a painful hush, that seems like minutes. Then he suddenly throws himself on his knees in the pulpit and prays. Violently moved, his flock prostrate themselves in a passion of entreaty, and those who sit on the ground bend double and touch the floor with their foreheads. The barbaric gaudy congregation, the ascetic earnest young teacher, the raucous wailing voices that rang through the great bare church, made up a poignantly impressive, quite inexplicable whole. I gazed upon the praying crowd and wondered vainly what their idea of Christianity may be and what old-world pre-Christian beliefs are entangled with it. The Albanian clings to these through everything, and in spite of all their efforts the Frati have as yet made little or no headway against blood- feuds. The Albanian has never adapted himself to anything; he has adapted the thing to himself. He practises the Christianity upon which he prides himself, with the ferocity with which he does everything else. He fasts with great rigour, wears a cross as a talisman, and is most particular to make the sign of the cross after the Latin and not after the Orthodox manner. But his views are very material. Have you got the Holy Ghost in your country? I have been asked more than once. And an affirmative answer brought the enthusiastic remark, Then England is just like Albania! The life of Benvenuto Cellini is interesting reading after a tour in Albania, for it represents with remarkable fidelity the stage in religious evolution to which the wild Albanian of to-day has arrived. Difference of religion is usually given as the reason for the fact that the Albanian has almost invariably sided with the enemies of the other
- 84. Christian peoples of the Balkans. One suspects, however, that it is rather the nature of the beast than the particular form of belief that he has chosen to profess that has cut him off, his fierce independence rather than his religious creed, and the more one sees of him the more probable does this appear. There are very few Orthodox Albanians in Skodra. Such as there are wear the same dress as the Mohammedans, but the women are not veiled. Skodra, except in the way of customs, possesses few antiquities, save the ruins of the old citadel which crown the hill overlooking the town. These are said to be of Venetian origin and to have been fairly perfect till some thirty years ago, when the local Pasha, having heard of lightning conductors, determined to buy one for the better protection of the tower, which was used as a powder magazine. To this end he chose a handsome brass spike, and then found he was expected to pay extra for a lot of wire. Being economical, he took the spike only, had it fixed to the topmost tower, and anxiously awaited a storm. It soon came! The handsome brass spike at once attracted the lightning. Bang went the powder magazine, and the greater part of the citadel was shattered before his astonished gaze. The hill now is crowned with a heap of ruins, but as strangers are strictly forbidden to visit it, I presume the Turks have constructed something that they consider a fortress among them. At the foot of this hill are the ruins of a small church. Big white crosses are painted upon it, and it is considered a very holy spot. Every Christian peasant stops as he passes it and crosses himself, and though all that is left are fragments of the walls, I have been told that a service is still occasionally held in it. The only other relic of past days in the neighbourhood is the fine stone bridge with pointed arches near Messi, about four and a half miles from Skodra across the plain. This is undoubtedly Venetian work. The stream it spans is a raging torrent in the wet season, and has wrought much damage in the town and devastated a large tract of the plain. The rest of this is covered with short turf and bracken fern, and grazed by flocks of sheep and goats. The herdsmen, shaggy in sheepskins and armed with rifles, the strings of country-people and pack-animals slowly tramping to or from market,
- 85. and the blue range of rugged mountains make up a strange, wild scene. Nor, if you take an Albanian with you to do the talking,—for everyone wants to know,—does there appear to me to be any danger in wandering there. Skodra is the capital, but it has no decent road to its port. It is situated on the outlet of the lake, but though a little money and work would make the Bojana River navigable for small steamers, and all the shores of the lake would thus be put in direct communication with the sea, nothing is done, and this, which should be the chief trade route for North Albania and a large part of Montenegro, is of little use. Skodras exports are not enough for Skodra to worry about greatly. Hides, tobacco, some sumach root and bark for dyeing and tanning, some maize and fruit, and a number of tortoises, which the Albanian finds ready-made, form the bulk of the exports of the neighbourhood. Skodra is one of the few capitals which you can leave with the certainty of finding it exactly the same next year. CHAPTER IX SKODRA TO DULCIGNO I have on one point, at any rate, a fellow-feeling with the Albanian. Skodra fascinates me. When I am not there—only then, mind you—I am almost prepared to swear with him that it is the finest city in the world, and a year after my first visit I found myself again on the steamer, hastening Skodra-wards, with the intention of riding thence to Dulcigno. Skodra greeted me warmly as an old friend. That exalted official the Persian beamed upon me and said that for Mademoiselle a passport was not necessary, the customs let me straight through, and I was soon settled comfortably in my old quarters. The Persian, because, so he said, of our long friendship, but really because he was aching with curiosity, called upon me at once in the crumpled and unclean white waistcoat in which he fancies himself, and chatted affably.
- 86. He comes, so he tells me, of a most exalted family; were he only in Tehran, instead of, unfortunately, in Skodra, he would be regarded with universal respect and veneration. As I have no idea of the standard required by Tehran, I condoled with him gravely, and accepted his statement. It was a great joy to Skodra, he informed me, that I should have come alone. No other lady had ever done so. Only une Anglaise would; for the English alone understand Turkey—are her dear friends. Here his enthusiasm was unbounded. Upon Turkish soil every English person was as safe as in England. This was owing to the excellence of the government. There is, he said, no government like ours. I told him the latter statement was universally believed, and pleased him greatly. He soared to higher flights. It was astonishing, he said, and most annoying, that false accounts of Turkey were published by foreign papers. He would go so far as saying that they never told the truth. It was even said that in parts of Turkey there had been considerable disturbances lately. Parole d'honneur, this was quite untrue. Never had the land been in a more tranquil or flourishing condition, and as a proof of his assertion he told me that his information was entirely derived from official sources. Now at this time, according to foreign papers, Russia, aided by Turkish troops, was vainly trying to force a Consul into Mitrovitza, encounters between troops and desperate villagers were reported almost daily from Macedonia, trains on the Salonika line had been more than once held up, and the governor of the very district we were in had been shot at some months before. But he burbled on of the beauty of the British Government and of the support it always afforded in the hour of need. Everything desirable, including liberty and equality, flourished under the Crescent, he said. At this moment a poverty-stricken little gang of ragged men tramped past, bearing in turns upon their shoulders a long battered old coffin, from which the paint was almost worn away. They stopped to shift it nearly opposite us. It was lidless, and the dead man's white face, his knees, and his great sheepskin stood above its edge. He lay in his clothes just as he died. The Persian, with ill-timed merriment, pointed to the corpse. A dead sheep, Mademoiselle! said he contemptuously. He addressed some remark in an unknown tongue to the mourners. The coffin-bearers passed sullenly. A dead Christian,
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