In this series, I summarized major arguments in A Suspicious Science: The Uses of Psychology. My exploration of the uses of psychology has emphasized the explanatory roles it fulfills within broader cultural projects. Briefly, empirical psychology seeks mechanistic explanations which then filter into popular uses of psychology, and discursive clinical …
The ethical quandary at the core of how we represent the mind in practical uses of psychology is the technology of agency. The biomedical and psychodynamic (i.e., discursive) approaches are “two different ways to identify, understand, and respond to mental anguish.”[i] In the latter, there are mechanistic accounts for how …
In its pragmatic project, empirical psychology employs metaphors to interpret data and deliver descriptive explanations.[i] Insofar as it is a positivist project, empirical psychology pursues reductive explanations which have the semblance of taking phenomena designated by natural language to be composed of more ‘real’ elements. Reductive descriptions of complex systems …
In this post, I explore how analogical modes of explanation have been used in empirical psychology to loop together data derived through experiments and descriptive explanation. Metaphor has been used to transcend the limitations of experiments on human subjects because it allows for framing higher-level interpretation of data through notions …
When I was in graduate school at Pitt around the late 1990s, I hung out with some faculty and students in the Psych Department. One day I asked one of the more ambitious Psych grad students, “what’s the future of psychology?” He answered without hesitation: “cognitive neuroscience”. Since then, psychology …
Welcome to the Brains Blog’s Symposium series on the Cognitive Science of Philosophy. The aim of the series is to examine the use of methods from the cognitive sciences to generate philosophical insight. Each symposium is comprised of two parts. In the target post, a practitioner describes their use of …
It’s my pleasure to introduce our next Ergo symposium, featuring Joseph Gottlieb’s “Verbal Disputes in the Theory of Consciousness“, including commentaries by Jonathan Farrell, Assaf Weksler, and Josh Weisberg. I’d like begin by thanking each of the participants for their great work.
