explaining the brain, by carl craver

craver's central hypothesis is that adequate explanations of how brain stuff is causally related to mental stuff are mechanistic in nature. apparently, philosophers have had some debate over similar issues in the past, and others have suggested other arguments (eg, the"covering law model" posits that "explanations explain...by showing that the phenomenon was to have been expected on the basis of the laws of nature". anyway, that explanations should incorporate mechanisms is fairly obvious to nearly all the good neuroscientists i know. this is clear upon reading any of their webpages, where they describe their research goals. for instance, the title of my thesis is something like, "inferring the neural mechanisms of..." (the ellipsis indicates that i think you don't care about the details). craver does however make a compelling argument to those people who haven't reached that conclusion just yet.

a central component of his argument is that these mechanisms must span multiple levels. for instance, if changes in neural circuitry are necessary for storing new information, then an adequate explanation should explain the relationship between spatiotemporal patterns of activity and synaptic plasticity, which are arguably different levels of explanation already. although this may again seem somewhat trivial, i think this is a valuable insight, even for those neuroscientists who agree about the mechanisms, as there is a significant "level-bias" in neuroscience research (ie, many investigators believe that explanations should lie at a particular level of description, eg, spatiotemporal patterns of spiking, versus across levels).

overall, i think he reaches a good conclusion, and makes a strong argument in support of it, so if you ask yourself, "what kind of explanations are adequate in (neuro)science" and your answer is not "mechanistic", i highly recommend this book. if, on the other hand, your answer is "mechanistic", it is somewhat less pertinent, but still an interesting read.