Laws and Makeups in Context-Dependent Reduction Relations

One of the problems encountered in Philosophy of Mind is that cognitive theories have a nontrivial dependence on the context of specific neurological makeups or mechanisms of individuals and species. Due to this context-dependency, for example, regularities or relationships between cognitive states are not considered genuine laws and cannot be directly related to neurological laws. The classical approaches to reduction such as bridge law reduction, functional reduction and interpretation mappings do not explicitly address this context-dependency. In this paper it is shown how these reduction approaches can be refined to incorporate the context-dependency. It is shown how the context-dependent reduction approaches obtained make explicit in which sense laws or regularities in a cognitive theory on the one hand relate to neurological laws and on the other hand to specific makeups.