McCauley’s Demand for a Co-level Competitor

McCauley’s is perhaps the most straightforward of the criticisms. He sees some form of reductive accommodation as the relation most likely to develop between propositional-attitude psychology, on the one hand, and the underlying neurosciences, on the other. In support of this expectation, he cites the typical co-evolutionary process described by Patricia S. Churchland, wherein theories at adjacent levels gradually knit themselves into some appropriate reductive relation or other. McCauley’s crucial move is then to claim that eliminative adjustments of theory are never (almost never?) motivated by considerations of cross-level conflict; rather, they are typically or properly motivated only by conflicts of theory at or within the same level of organization. In the absence of some compelling and comparably high-level alternative to folk psychology, then, we need not see folk psychology (FP) as facing any real threat of elimination. Accordingly, says McCauley, we should stand back and let the gradual interlevel knitting of theory proceed.