Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. P. M. S. Hacker

Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience - P. M. S. Hacker


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Mereological Confusions in Cognitive Neuroscience

      Ascribing psychological attributes to the brain

      Leading figures of the first two generations of modern brain-neuroscientists were fundamentally Cartesian. Like Descartes, they distinguished the mind from the brain, and ascribed psychological attributes to the mind. The ascription of such attributes to human beings was, accordingly, derivative – as in Cartesian metaphysics. The third generation of neuroscientists, however, repudiated the dualism of their teachers. In the course of explaining the possession of psychological attributes by human beings, they ascribed such attributes not to the mind but to the brain or parts of the brain.

      Neuroscientists assume that the brain has a wide range of cognitive, cogitative, perceptual and volitional powers. Francis Crick asserts:

      3.2 Challenging the Consensus: The Brain Is Not the Subject of Psychological Attributes

      Questioning the intelligibility of ascribing psychological attributes to the brain

      Whether psychological attributes can intelligibly be ascribed to the brain is a philosophical, and therefore a conceptual, question, not a scientific one

      The question we are confronting is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. It calls for conceptual clarification, not for experimental investigation. One cannot investigate experimentally whether brains do or do not think, believe, guess, reason, form hypotheses, etc. until one knows what it would be for a brain to do so – that is, until we are clear about the meanings of these phrases and know what (if anything) counts as a brain’ s doing these things and what sort of evidence would support the ascription of such attributes to the brain.


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