By Mark Simes

The human mind is one of our most compelling subjects of scientific inquiry—and perhaps our most elusive. Despite impressive biological advances, neuroscience has yet to produce a logical and empirical analysis of the mind that exhibits universal, objective explanatory power of human mental phenomena on both an individual and species level. “The Mind’s Irreducible Structure,” published in Sociological Mind in July 2012, explores the limitations of the current neuroscientific approach to the human mind and argues for a reconceptualization of the relationship between human mental phenomena and the brain. In the article, I introduce a new interpretation of neuroscientific data and argue that this framework has the capacity to causally explain the link between social, psychological and biological levels of analysis.

A PDF of the article is here