Dan Burnston Philosophy Department, Tulane University Tulane Brain Institute Tools come in a variety of forms. Many experimental tools are ways of intervening upon and measuring the system of interest. Other tools, however, are analytical tools – tools for organizing and scrutinizing data taken from measurement. A major methodological advance …
Ann-Sophie Barwich Philosophy and Cognitive Science University of Indiana, Bloomington Imagine for a moment that you are observing the development of a groundbreaking experiment right before your eyes. You rapidly recognize that this study will make substantial contributions to the field and actually break new ground, but you are unable …
Carl F. Craver Philosophy and PNP Program Washington University in St. Louis Why are scientific tools philosophically interesting? Because instruments are where the rubber of experimentation meets the road of world. In my paper, I explore the epistemic norms that govern when a tool can be used …
John Bickle, Mississippi State University and University of Mississippi Medical Center I begin “Tinkering in the lab” by reviewing my previous publications on tool development in neuroscience. I take that work to suggest that in lab-based sciences such as neurobiology, theory is secondary to and entirely dependent upon, both historically …
The Editors of The Tools of Neuroscience Experiment: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives, John Bickle (Mississippi State University and the University of Mississippi Medical Center), Carl F. Craver (Washington University in St. Louis) and Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana University, Bloomington) are grateful to the editors of The Brains Blog for the opportunity …
Embodied (sensorimotor) theories of cognition lead us to expect that subtle differences in motor skills accumulated over a lifetime of experience will impact an individual’s temporal coordination of motor and conceptual information, the automatic interpersonal mimicry of motor behaviors, and the neural representation of objects and events. Given this embodied framework, …
The 4E-approach to human cognition has opened new perspective to many human activities, to reading and writing among other things. The 4E-approach enables us to focus on the essence of reading and writing: what in fact happens when we say that we are reading or writing. Unlike in the era …
