Ruthless reductionism and social cognition.

Social cognition appears to present phenomena that "ruthlessly reductive" molecular and cellular neuroscience cannot fruitfully investigate or explain. This is because the causes of such phenomena are distal and external not only to the molecular machinery of individual neurons, but to individual brains. However, the "reductionist's epiphany" insists that to the extent that we understand the specific molecular mechanisms that underlie phenomena upon which most or all social cognition depends, we can be sure that molecular mechanisms for the broader phenomena can be found using standard experimental methods from molecular and cellular cognition. Furthermore, social recognition memory consolidation is required for virtually all types of social cognition, and its specific molecular mechanisms have now been uncovered experimentally. These same molecular mechanisms obtain across a wide variety of divergent species (from invertebrates to vertebrates). Thus we can expect to find the molecular mechanisms of the broader social cognitive functions that must "plug into" these specific molecular mechanisms, despite these functions' typically distal, external initial causes. This conclusion rests on explicit scientific facts, not just on some vague philosophical commitment to physicalism about mind.