Neuroscience and the explanation of psychological phenomena

Explanatory problems in the philosophy of neuroscience are not weil capture d by the division between the radical and the trivial neuron doctrines. The actual problem is, instead, whether mechanistic biological explanations ac ross different levels of description can be extended to account for psychol ogical phenomena. According to cognitive neuroscience, some neural levels o f description at least are essential for the explanation of psychological p henomena, whereas, in traditional cognitive science, psychological explanat ions are completely independent of the neural levels of description. The ch allenge for cognitive neuroscience is to discover the levels of description appropriate for the neural explanation of psychological phenomena.