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 …
In A Suspicious Science, I analyze the epistemic context of the uses of psychology in contemporary society so as to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-level human science. I distinguish three uses of psychology: positivist-pragmatic empirical study, discursive therapeutic approaches which promote expressive individualism, and reflexive creative practices employed in the arts …
What is the mind, and how does it work? Centuries of philosophical and scientific investigation have shown that these questions are too big to be tackled once and for all with a single explanatory endeavor. The magnitude of this pursuit has necessitated a multidisciplinary approach: several disciplinary fields have tackled …
Brain regions might carry out well-defined functions— edge detection in primary visual cortex, “error monitoring” in the anterior cingulate cortex, and so on. But regions don’t function alone, so when they combine in functional circuits or networks, the behavior of the circuit/network might lead to emergent behaviors, as discussed in …
Emergence might be incontrovertible to physicists or mathematicians, but not in neuroscience. Why is it so controversial? One reason seems clear. It’s fair to say that neuroscience follows what could be called Herbert Simon’s dictum: we’re interested and indeed comfortable in taking on research problems and domains that involve near-decomposable …
Neuroscience tends to study parts of the brain separately. The Entangled Brain promotes the idea that, instead, we need to understand the brain as a complex, entangled system. Accordingly, the business of a brain region needs to be situated in the context of multi-region circuits: What does a brain region …
