The Neural Mechanisms Online Team (Fabrizio Calzavarini & Marco Viola) is grateful to the managing editors of The Brains Blog for the opportunity to present (a selection of chapters from) our edited collection throughout this week.
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Drawing on the experience and on the network of the homonymous web-events (neuralmechanisms.org), the edited volume Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in Philosophy of Neuroscience (Springer 2021) comprises twenty chapters from a vast array of authors, dealing with epistemological, ontological, and methodological issues in philosophy of neuroscience. We have invited the authors of some chapters that we deemed interesting for a broad audience to contribute with a post to present their chapter throughout this week (Chirimuuta, Weiskopf, Gessell, Burnston & Haueis).
The book is not meant to be a manifesto of what the philosophy of neuroscience is or ought to be. Nor it aims at being an exhaustive survey of the field: indeed, several hot topics, e.g., predictive processing or the neural correlates of consciousness, are almost absent from our book. Such omissions are not due to our failure to acknowledge the relevance of such and other debates. Nor do they reflect any preposterous pretense of “agenda-setting” for the philosophy of neuroscience. More simply, there is more ground to cover than one can fit into a single book – even a 500-page-long book like the one we are speaking about.
Prima facie, this sounds like a cliché: the very same is often told for many other topics. However, when it comes to the philosophy of neuroscience, the presence of such an abundance of debate is not so obvious. Back in 1978, when George Miller submitted the famous report on the status of Cognitive Science to the Sloan Foundation, the interaction between philosophy and neuroscience was reported to be virtually nonexistent. Later, despite the influence of Patricia Churchland’s 1986 book Neurophilosophy, when in 2008 Gold and Roskies rhetorically asked, “Is there a philosophy of neuroscience?” (2008: 2), their answer was still a timid “yes and no”, because “there are but a handful of philosophers of science who focus on neuroscience”.
We think that nowadays, the same question deserves a fully positive answer: some philosophers, including ourselves, are trained specifically to address philosophical questions pertaining to neuroscience. And the ever-increasing number of requests of participation to webinars, as well as the flourishing of other webinar series devoted explicitly to the philosophy of neuroscience, suggests that this disciplinary niche is gaining traction.
That said, while it seems hard to deny that the philosophy of neuroscience is a thing, establishing its boundaries and its “canon” seems far more challenging.
If a core of the discipline ought to be pointed at, that might include the mechanistic framework of scientific explanations and possibly some metaphysical issues surrounding reductionism and mental representation. However, while several chapters in our book seek to improve the nuances of the mechanistic framework (e.g. Plebe; Kaplan & Hewiston; Kästner; Kohar & Krickel), others challenge the hegemony of mechanistic framework by pinpointing the shortcomings of decomposition and localization (Silberstein), or simply by vindicating the epistemic value of the topological models not only for explanations, but also for predictions (Gessell et al.). As for reductionism, some chapters suggest that trying to reduce folk psychology to neural categories might stem from a misinterpretation of the scope of folk psychology (Dewhurst), and that the mind-body problem translates from a metaphysical toward an epistemological frame (Nathan; Vernazzani). In our book, the topic of mental representation is well represented (pun intended), ranging from embodied representations (Brozzo; Orban & Wong) and the job description challenge (Klein & Clutton) toward that of computational psychiatry (Colombo). Still, other chapters tackle the implications of neural reuse (Favela; Rathkopf), methodological developments such as the MVPA (Weiskopf), the nuances of data analysis (Wright), the notions of hierarchy (Burnston & Haueis) and constraints (Raja & Anderson), and the old-fashioned analogy between brains and computers (Chirimuuta).
However, even if the list of topics covered in our book were meant to be representative of the whole field (which, again, is not the case), an ostensive definition underdetermines the boundaries of the disciplinary niche that we shall call “philosophy of neuroscience”. Provided that the boundaries of a disciplinary niche are to be defined philosophically (rather than sociologically), several questions remain unaddressed. For instance, what is the boundary or the relationship between the philosophy of neuroscience and the philosophies of psychology and of biology? In more practical terms, what differences (if any) should there be between curricula devoted to the philosophy of neuroscience as opposed to those in the philosophy of biology/psychology? Also, what kind of engagement should philosophers have with empirical technicalities? We have no answers to these questions – not yet already. But we invite to bear them in mind while reading the posts that will follow during this week.