Heuristic identity theory (or back to the future): The mind-body problem against the background of research strategies in cognitive neuroscience
Abstract
Functionalists in philosophy of mind traditionally raise two major arguments against the type identity theory: (1) psychological states are _multiply realizable_ so that there are no one-to-one mappings of psychological states onto neural states and (2) the most that evidence could ever establish is the _correlation_ of psychological and neural states, not their identity. We defend a variant on the traditional type identity theory which we call _heuristic identity theory_ (HIT) against both of these objections. Drawing its inspiration from scientific practice, heuristic identity theory construes identity claims as hypotheses that guide subsequent inquiry, not as conclusions of the research