Abstract:
The taxonomic practices of psychologists and neuroscientists coincide in some respects and diverge in others. I will argue that the divergences are significant and may not be resolvable, since they may result from disparate explanatory interests. These explanatory interests, in turn, pertain to distinct causal processes that are sometimes orthogonal to one another. Using a case study drawn from research on episodic memory in humans, I will argue that there is evidence to suggest that psychological and neural taxonomies can crosscut each other, i.e. that there can be a many-to-many mapping between psychological and neural categories. I will go on to diagnose some of the reasons for this mismatch, which complicates the search for a “structure-to-function” mapping.