The pitfall of neurobiological reductionism

Although we subscribe to the idea of promoting associationism, the project of elaborating a general model relying only on neurobiological data seems doomed to failure. For several decades now, in departure from the conceptions of Pavlov, Thorndike or Skinner that served as references for Hebb, first-hand workers on associative learning have considered that associations take place between mental representations, possibly complex ones. The laws governing their formation and evolution apply at a level of explanation other than the biological one. The shortcomings of neurobiological reductionism are not due to the fact that knowledge in this field is still incomplete, but to the need for considering the mental level as causal in cognitive sciences. We suggest that the field of dynamical systems, involving the related concepts of emergence, reciprocal causality, and self-organization, provides the best framework to conceive the across-time interplay between mental, biological, and environmental events.