Review The New Face of Positivism John Bickle, Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Re- ductive Approach. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003. xvi + 235 pp. ISBN 1–4020–1302–7 (pbk). P.S. Churchland (1998) once remarked that reductionism is often misconceived as ‘seeking a direct explanatory bridge between highest and lowest levels. This idea of “explanation in a single bound” does stretch credulity, but neuroscientists are not remotely tempted by it’ (p. 26). For John Bickle however, there is no such misconception; not only are neuroscientists tempted by it, their entire enterprise is built around the goal of discovering ‘mind-to-molecule links’. As such, philoso- phers, psychologists and cognitive scientists need to be disabused of precisely this sort of explanatory prudence. Nothing short of a manifesto, Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Re- ductive Account is an intrepid polemic aimed at both touting accomplished reduc- tions of cognitive phenomena to cellular/molecular mechanisms, and exscinding deeply entrenched intuitions about explanatory autonomy, mental causation, multi- ple realizability, the hard problem of consciousness and other sorts of ‘philosophical exotica’. Bickle contends that a ‘ruthless reductionism’ is built into the very fabric of neuroscientific investigation—a checkered claim that cobbles together different senses of ‘reduction’ (methodological, explanatory, ontological, intertheoretic, etc.). Most of chapter 1 fruitfully revisits the models and history of intertheoretic reduction, including the familiar story of mappings from higher-level, reduced theories (T R ) to corrected analogs (T R *) constructed within the frameworks of lower-level, reducing theories (T B ). Yet, there is a significant transition away from the formal, set theoretic structuralism grounding Bickle’s earlier New Wave model (Bickle, 1998). The sense of ‘reduction’ that emerges is one that borrows heavily from ontic conceptions of explanation in a broadly causal-mechanical philosophy of science, but that, at times, glosses over several nuanced distinctions between reductionistic and mechanistic explanation (cf. Bechtel & Richardson, 1993). The ‘ruthless’ feature of Bickle’s reductionism is continuous with the New Wave model’s eliminativist undercurrents (cf. Endicott, 2001; Wright, 2000). After a nod toward the heuristic role of higher-level functional explanations, Bickle suggests that, ultimately, the explanatory status of psychological research is rendered ‘im- potent’ and left to ‘disappear’ (p. 111). He writes, ‘Within scientific practice, psychological explanations become otiose when the cellular/molecular explanation . . . is achieved. There is no need to evoke psychological causal explanations, and in Theory & Psychology Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications. Vol. 14(6): 855–857 DOI: 10.1177/0959354304048116 www.sagepublications.com