ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Levels of biological plausibility.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- A formal explanation space for the simultaneous clustering of neurologic diseases based on their signs and symptoms.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2025Article
- Coordinating multiple mental faculties during learning.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Plausibility and Early Theory in Linguistics and Cognitive Science.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- A Critical Perspective on Neural Mechanisms in Cognitive Neuroscience: Towards Unification.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Revisiting the role of computational neuroimaging in the era of integrative neuroscience.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Review
- Spatiotemporal relationships between neuronal, metabolic, and hemodynamic signals in the awake and anesthetized mouse brain.Cell reports · 2024Article
- A multilevel account of hippocampal function in spatial and concept learning: Bridging models of behavior and neural assemblies.Science advances · 2023Article
- Neural learning rules for generating flexible predictions and computing the successor representation.eLife · 2023Article
- Explanatory personality science in the neuroimaging era: The map is not the territory.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2022Article
- Key relationships between non-invasive functional neuroimaging and the underlying neuronal activity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Building and Understanding the Minimal Self.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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1 author.
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Abstract
Notions of mechanism, emergence, reduction and explanation are all tied to levels of analysis. I cover the relationship between lower and higher levels, suggest a level of mechanism approach for neuroscience in which the components of a mechanism can themselves be further decomposed and argue that scientists' goals are best realized by focusing on pragmatic concerns rather than on metaphysical claims about what is 'real'. Inexplicably, neuroscientists are enchanted by both reduction and emergence. A fascination with reduction is misplaced given that theory is neither sufficiently developed nor formal to allow it, whereas metaphysical claims of emergence bring physicalism into question. Moreover, neuroscience's existence as a discipline is owed to higher-level concepts that prove useful in practice. Claims of biological plausibility are shown to be incoherent from a level of mechanism view and more generally are vacuous. Instead, the relevant findings to address should be specified so that model selection procedures can adjudicate between competing accounts. Model selection can help reduce theoretical confusions and direct empirical investigations. Although measures themselves, such as behaviour, blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) and single-unit recordings, are not levels of analysis, like levels, no measure is fundamental and understanding how measures relate can hasten scientific progress. This article is part of the theme issue 'Key relationships between non-invasive functional neuroimaging and the underlying neuronal activity'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.