ABSTRACT
The philosophy of psychology is concerned with issues that span work in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and empirical psychology. Psychology is not a unified field but a diverse confederation of subfields and research programs, any of which could form a focal point for philosophical attention; and indeed many have, including psychoanalysis, social psychology, and abnormal psychology. But it is cognitive psychology – and the field of cognitive science, of which it is a central part – that has dominated research in the philosophy of psychology; and it is this research that I focus on here. Though cognitive scientists disagree on many issues, one widespread commitment is that the mind is a mechanism of some sort: roughly, a physical device decomposable into functionally specifiable subparts. On this assumption, a central task for psychology is to characterize the nature of that mechanism: its basic operations, component parts, and development. Much philosophy of psychology is concerned with the project; and in the following sections I aim to provide a flavor of the research by considering three prominent issues:
• Is the mind a computer of some sort? • To what extent are minds modular in organization? • To what extent is our mental structure innately specified?
