Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. P. M. S. Hacker
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cared about understanding the results of his research, then he had good reason for caring about the conceptual confusions under which he laboured – for they stood in the way of an adequate understanding.
In other cases, however, the conceptual confusion does not so happily bracket the empirical research. Misguided questions may well render research futile (examples will be examined in relation to mental imagery (§6.3.1 [§7.3.1]) and voluntary movement (§8.2 [§9.2])). Rather differently, misconstrual of concepts and conceptual structures will sometimes produce research that is by no means futile, but that fails to show what it was designed to show (examples will be discussed in relation to memory (§§5.2.1–5.2.2 [§§6.2.1–6.2.2]) and to emotions and appetites (§7.1 [§8.1])). In such cases, the science may not be flourishing quite as much as it appears to be. It requires conceptual investigation to locate the problems and to eliminate them.
Are these conceptual confusions unavoidable? Not at all. The whole point of writing this book is to show how to avoid them. But, of course, they cannot be avoided while leaving everything else intact. They can be avoided – but if they are, then certain kinds of questions will no longer be asked, since they will be recognized as resting on a misunderstanding. As Hertz put it in the wonderful introduction to his Principles of Mechanics: ‘When these painful contradictions are removed, … our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.’ Equally, certain kinds of inferences will no longer be drawn from a given body of empirical research, since it will be realized to have little or no bearing on the matter which it was meant to illuminate, even though it may bear on something else.
If there are problematic concepts, can they not be replaced by others that serve the same explanatory function? A scientist is always free to introduce new concepts if he finds existing ones inadequate or insufficiently refined. But our concern in this book is not with the use of new technical concepts. We are concerned with the misuse of old, nontechnical concepts – concepts of mind and body, thought and imagination, sensation and perception, knowledge and memory, voluntary movement, and consciousness and self-consciousness. There is nothing inadequate about these concepts relative to the purposes they serve. There is no reason for thinking that they need to be replaced in the contexts that are of concern to us. What are problematic are neuroscientists’ misconstruals of them and the misunderstandings consequently engendered. These are remediable by a correct account of the logico-grammatical character of the concepts in question. And this is what we have tried to supply.
Granted that neuroscientists may not be using these common or garden concepts the way the man in the street does, with what right can philosophy claim to correct them? How can philosophy so confidently judge the clarity and coherence of concepts as deployed by competent scientists? How can philosophy be in a position to claim that certain assertions made by sophisticated neuroscientists make no sense? We shall resolve such methodological qualms in the following pages. But some initial clarification here may remove some doubts. What truth and falsity is to science, sense and nonsense is to philosophy. Observational and theoretical error result in falsehood; conceptual error results in lack of sense. How can one investigate the bounds of sense? Only by examining the use of words. Nonsense is often generated when an expression is used contrary to the rules for its use. The expression in question may be an ordinary, non-technical expression, in which case the rules for its use can be elicited from its standard employment and received explanations of its meaning. Or it may be a technical term of art, in which case the rules for its use must be elicited from the theorist’ s introduction of the term and the explanations he offers of its stipulated use. Both kinds of term can be misused, and when they are, nonsense ensues – a form of words that is excluded from the language. For either nothing has been stipulated as to what the term means in the aberrant context in question, or this form of words is actually excluded by a rule specifying that there is no such thing as … (e.g. that there is no such thing as ‘east of the North Pole’), that this is a form of words that has no use. Nonsense is also commonly generated when an existing expression is given a new, perhaps technical or quasi-technical use, and the new use is inadvertently crossed with the old – for example, inferences are drawn from propositions containing the new term which could only licitly be drawn from the use of the old one. It is the task of the conceptual critic to identify such transgressions of the bounds of sense. It is, of course, not enough to show that a certain scientist has used a term contrary to its ordinary use – for he may well be using the term in a new sense. The critic must show that the scientist intends using the term in its customary sense and has not done so, or that he intends using it in a new sense but has inadvertently crossed the new sense with the old. The wayward scientist should, whenever possible, be condemned out of his own mouth. We address methodological qualms in detail both in chapter 3, section 3, and in chapter 14 [17].
The final misconception against which we wish to warn is the idea that our reflections are unremittingly negative. All we are concerned with, it might be thought, is criticizing. Our work may appear at a superficial glance to be no more than a destructive undertaking that promises neither assistance nor a new way forward. Worse, it may even appear to be engineering a confrontation between philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We have written this book in admiration for the achievements of twentieth-century neuroscience, and out of a desire to assist the subject. But the only ways in which a conceptual investigation can assist an empirical subject are by identifying conceptual error ( if it obtains) and by providing a map that will help prevent empirical researchers from wandering off the high roads of sense. Each of our investigations has two aspects to it. On the one hand, we have tried to identify conceptual problems and entanglements in important current theories of perception, memory, imagination, emotion and volition. Moreover, we argue that much contemporary writing on the nature of consciousness and self-consciousness is bedevilled by conceptual difficulties. This aspect of our investigations is indeed negative and critical. On the other hand, we have endeavoured, from case to case, to provide a perspicuous representation of the conceptual field of each of the problematic concepts. This is a constructive endeavour. We hope that these conceptual overviews will assist neuroscientists in their reflections antecedent to the design of their experiments. However, it cannot be the task of a conceptual investigation to propose empirical hypotheses that might solve the empirical problems faced by scientists. To complain that a philosophical investigation into cognitive neuroscience has not contributed a new neuroscientific theory is like complaining to a mathematician that a new theorem he has proved is not a new physical theory.
It is improbable that many neuroscientists will wish to read a 450-page conceptual investigation from cover to cover. Consequently, we have tried to make our chapters on select psychological concepts as self-contained as possible. We have done this in the hope that the book will serve as a conceptual reference work for cognitive neuroscientists who wish to check the contour lines of the psychological concept relevant to their investigation. This has, of course, meant that there is a degree of repetition between certain chapters. This is, we hope, warranted by the objective.
The chapters of the book are accompanied by italicized marginalia indicating the subject under discussion in the correlated paragraph or paragraphs. The purpose of this is to facilitate surveyability, to make it easier to follow the steps in the argument, and to assist in locating arguments. The section headings in the table of contents are accompanied by the italicized names of neuroscientists (and occasionally philosophers who concern themselves with neuroscientific and cognitive scientific matters) whose theories are either discussed in some detail or mentioned en passant in the course of the chapter. This will, we hope, help the reader to locate the themes and discussions that are of specific interest with ease.
Introduction to the Second Edition
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience was written at the beginning of the century. It has been widely read and often cited, and has provoked extensive debate that, we hope, has been fruitful. Our publishers, Wiley Blackwell, suggested that we write a second edition to bring the book up