title: The reification objection to bottom-up cognitive ontology revision.
abstract: Anderson (2014) proposes a bottom-up approach to cognitive ontology revision: Neuroscientists should revise their taxonomies of cognitive constructs on the basis of brain activation patterns across many tasks. We argue that such bottom-up proposal is bound to commit a mistake of reification: It treats the abstract mathematical entities uncovered by dimension reduction techniques as if they were real psychological entities.
authors: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15217. jbm48@pitt.edu  http://www.josephbmccaffrey.com
authors: Joseph B
authors: JB
authors: McCaffrey
authors: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15217. machery@pitt.edu http://www.hps.pitt.edu/profile/machery.php
authors: Edouard
authors: E
authors: Machery
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical