In which case, for those of us who believe in the scientiWc status of
psychology, there is nothing more that we need do, in order to naturalise
intentional content, than to point out that such contentsWgure within the
laws of psychology. So those who have been seeking a naturalisedreduc-
tionof intentional content have not only been chasing something which
may in fact be unattainable, but they have been doing so unnecessarily. All
they really ever needed to do was defend the scientiWc status of intentional
psychology directly, without seeking any sort of reduction.
What becomes of the supposedunityof science, however, on the picture
being sketched here? Can we really allow all the various special sciences to
Xoat free of one another? Can we allow that natural science just consists of
‘one more damn law after another’, with no requirements of ordering or
integration between them? If so, then there would be no principled objec-
tion to dualism, since the laws of psychology would not be required to
stand in any particular relation to laws governing brain-processes. But
plainly, belief in the irreducibility and reality of the special sciences need
not entail anything nearly so strong. On the contrary, we can continue to
insist on token identities between special-science occurrences and physical
events. That is, whenever a property is tokened which falls under some
special-science law (of psychology, as it might be), we can (and surely
should) require that the token be identical with (be none other than) the
tokening of some lower-level (and, ultimately, physical) property hap-
pening at the same time. So, belief in the irreducibility of the special
sciences is at least consistent with our well-motivated physicalism.
It may be, indeed, that we can (and should) believe in a weakened
version of the doctrine of the unity of science, without succumbing to
reductionism, as Smith (1992) argues. Roughly, the idea is that it must be
possible to seekexplanationsof special-science laws in terms of lower-level
mechanisms. That is, it should be possible to render itunmysteriousthat a
given special-science law obtains, given the ways in which the properties
involved in that law can be realised in physical mechanisms, and given the
lower-level laws which govern such mechanisms. Put slightly diVerently: it
may be reasonable to believe that eachtokenprocess which happens in
accordance with a special-science law must be realised in a token process
describable in the vocabulary of some lower-level science, which is also
lawful at that lower level. In which case, in order to be realists (and
naturalists) about psychology, we must be able to believe that in connec-
tion with each token psychological process, there is some process des-
cribable in the vocabulary of physics and/or chemistry and/or neurology,
whose occurrence issuYcient for(because it is therealiser of) the occur-
rence of the psychological process in question.
But there is surely no requirement that we must already be able topoint
Naturalisation versus reduction 187