ABSTRACT
We can find actual cases of multiple realizability in anthropology and psychology. In anthropology, the study of cultures has revealed various properties of highly organized, integrated systems. Stable cultures tend, under normal stresses, to produce effects that reinforce the stability of those cultures. Many different specific effects (for example, different rituals and social activities) can serve this stabilizing function. The function that serves social stability is thus multiply realizable. In psychology, the process of producing sentences with a particular structural description can take place by normal means in Broca’s area of the brain or by abnormal means, in the case of clinical damage, in the higher cortex. As biologically interesting as these distinct realizations are, what matters to psychological explanation (at least from the perspective of psycholinguistic accounts of syntactic processing) is the process of parsing sentences, not the specific biological description of this process.
