Multiple realization was once taken to be a challenge to reductionist visions, especially within neuroscience. In the view of reductionism, neuroscience, as the bottom-up analysis for a mind, can supplement or replace the psychological method. Especially, Bechtel & Mundale made an argument opposed to non-reductionism based on the successes of neuroscience: if psychological states are multiply realized across biological species, then neuroscience - the empirical study of brains - will be of little use toward understanding cognition. But as details of fruits of the neuroscience, neuroscientists have successfully used understanding of the brain to decompose the cognitive function. Also, they showed that the initial plausibility of claims to multiple realizability rest on mismatching a broad-grained criterion for the psychological states with a fine-grained criterion for the brain states. On the other hand, non-reductionist argued that (1) psychology has the methodical autonomy from neuroscience, so that neuroscientific data cannot be applied to interpret the state of mind, and (2) actually, there are empirical evidences to confirm multiple realization in the neural state. To refute those arguments, I;;ll show how neuroscience can explain the mental state, and support Bechtel & Mundale arguments. First, I make an argument against the autonomy of psychology. Unlike the argument of non-reductionists, neuroscientists adopted psychological studies to examine how brain areas are identified and gave the empirical evidence of the correspondence between the neural state and the mental state. For distinguishing areas of the brain, they use the functional hierarchy of the mental state which has been studied in psychology, as well as the neural activation signal. Also they deduced the relation between the neural state and the mental state from the forward-inference and the reverse-inference. Furthermore, the findings of neuroscience can be used as the heuristic approach to infer the novel function of cognition, because some cognitive functions cannot be detected by psychological research. For these reasons, it is difficult to argue that the neurosciences can be methodologically separated from psychology. Second, the criterion of the empirical evidence for multiple realization should be set. I adopted Shapiro;;s criterion to examine which phenomena can be regarded as the genuine example of multiple realization. Non-reductionist argued that the degenerate states of neural structure be the example of multiple realization. The degeneracy seem to be plausible, however, it;;s not the genuine case of multiple realization. The degenerate neural structures seem to perform same cognitive functions, but if we consider their causally relevant properties - like purpose, strategy, etc. - they are not the same mental kinds by definition. Therefore, the degeneracy cannot be counted as the genuine instance of multiple realizability. In brief, I conclude that neuroscience can be the empirical approach to study the correspondence between the mental state and the neural state, and multiple realizability doesn;;t exist or, is not at least significant.
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