ABSTRACT
An exciting prospect for those psychologists in the naive realist tradition has been that the brain is the primary source of explanation for all experience and behaviour. Covering laws claiming neurological or neurochemical causation of behaviour separated from its particular context are untenable but tendencies can be conceded. This chapter focuses on the errors of reductionism and transduction. The field of neuroscience is certainly interdisciplinary but its willing collaborators constantly run the risk of ‘neuro-reductionism’. The risk of neuro-reductionism has stimulated a critical commentary in relation to neuroscience. In the case of neuroscientific ideology, critical realists do not go down the road of either hoped-for or taken-for-granted neuro-reductionism. An implication for critical realists is how scientists reason in the background. Critical realism puts neuroscience in its place, giving it due weight but not overvaluing or sacralising its explanatory power.
