Review of Reductionism and the Development of Knowledge, T. Brown & L. Smith (Eds.); Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002

Reductionism and the Development of Knowledge is a collection of well written essays that are all are based on presentations held at the 1999 Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society. Each essay discusses an aspect of the question if human knowledge as expressed in one scientific domain can be translated in terms of another scientific domain. For instance, can psychological phenomena be stated in terms of brain states? The 19th century founding fathers of psychology, Wilhelm Wundt and Franz Brentano argued that a reduction of psychological phenomena to physical ones is impossible. Physical phenomena, according to them, should be the subject matter of the (physical) sciences [Naturwissenschaften]. Mental phenomena, however, would be qualitatively so different from physical ones that they cannot be studied in the same manner as physical phenomena. The scientific research of mental phenomena, then, should take place according to different methods developed