The Naturalistic Incline

Cognitive science has gone, within a half-century, from a configuration in which neuroscience held at most a marginal role, to one in which it occupies center stage, if not the entire stage. How can one account for such a reversal? The paper aims at complementing the usual explanations – the shortcomings of classical cognitive science, the momentous development of neuroscience fueled by neural imagery... – by the consideration of the pressure exerted by the demand to naturalize: the study of the brain appears today, compared to the classical approach, as a quick and sure path towards naturalizing the mind. Far from being obvious, this is a mistake based on the erroneous idea that we know what it is to naturalize a given realm before we get down to actually develop the science that accomplishes it. Once this illusion evaporates, a more balanced perspective on the field, both in its historical unfolding and in its present state, is restored.