Abstract
In an intellectual atmosphere still marked by the ideological failures of the twentieth century, the expectations for neuroscience are extremely high, even in fields traditionally sheltered from the seductions of neurobiological explanations, such as political theory, sociology and philosophy. In an attempt to problematize the reception that this neuroscientific vocabulary has received, I provide in this article a cartography of three major lines of philosophical criticism of neuroscience – ‘conceptual’, ‘societal’ and ‘embodied-enactive’ – put forward recently by philosophers of different intellectual traditions. Although these criticisms are important in shedding light on some epistemological inconsistencies of the neuroscientific programme, the need remains to supplement this philosophical work with a different kind of critique, one that could address more directly the social and political relevance of neuroscience as well understand our epoch's urge to ‘turn neurobiological’ previously cultural or sociological phenomena.
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Notes
A similar cartography, in a more detailed way, appears also in Meloni (2011c).
From Dewey (1929/1958) to Thompson (2007), for instance.
See the recent launch of the so-called ‘Critical Neuroscience’, ‘a reflexive scientific practice that responds to the social and cultural challenges posed both to the field of science and to society in general by recent advances in the behavioural and brain sciences’ (Choudhury et al, 2009, p. 62).
In his classic article, Benton (1991, pp. 12–13) distinguished at least four different strands of this anti-naturalistic influence in social theory, all worthy to be recalled here to provide an idea of the powerful influence of this variegated intellectual tradition: (a) Durkheim's ‘insistence on the status of the social as a causal order in its own right’; (b) Max Weber's theoretical roots in the German neo-Kantian movement and his ‘basic oppositions between action and behaviour, meaning and cause, interpretation and explanation’; (c) the anti-naturalistic turn of much Western Marxism of the early twentieth century, from Lukacs to Gramsci; (d) ‘the influential tradition of American cultural anthropology’, from Boas to Kroeber and Lowie up to Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins, with its roots in Boas's firm rejection of the scientific racism and biological determinism of his own time. See for a more general reading of the anti-naturalistic legacy of European philosophy and its threefold way of reacting to naturalism: Meloni (2011b).
See also, for a revival of their criticism, Bennett and Hacker (2008).
There is no way in this article to satisfactorily provide the full intellectual context of a book like Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. In a nutshell, this book represents the point of emergence for the struggle within the post-analytic tradition in philosophy between supporters of naturalism (Daniel Dennett to name one) and authors such as Hacker who defend an idea of philosophy as totally discontinuous from empirical research, only in business with ‘concepts’, ‘form of thought’ (BH, p. 404), and ‘normative connections’ (BH, p. 406): ‘philosophers’ BH claim ‘are not neuroscientists manqués’ (BH, p. 403). For the fierce debate between analytic and post-analytic philosophers following the publication of the book, see Bennett et al (2007).
Similar points also made in Putnam (1994).
Some of the sentences of this section on Descombes also appear in Meloni (2011a).
Accents and tones may vary greatly between different authors. More friendly approaches to neuroscience prevail in many recent works that aim to offer ‘a more adequate model of perception for the scientist to work with’ (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008, p. 9), thus promoting a sort of ‘mutually illuminating relationship’ with brain research (Thompson, 2007, p. X): neurophenomenology is the first example that comes to mind with such a perspective (Varela, 1996; see also Petitot et al, 1999). However, this neuroscience-friendly approach should not let the critical dimension of embodied-enactivism disappear. A typical case of this critical attitude is, Alva Noë's recent Out of Our Heads with its political ambition to ‘shake up the cognitive science establishment’ (2009, p. XIV), and ‘set aside’ the research programme of mainstream neuroscience (2009, p. 185).
A different way to look critically at the philosophical implications of neuroscience, one that neither addresses principally the insignificance, as in Hacker and Descombes, nor the inadequacy of the scientific vocabulary to its object, as in embodied-enactivism, but mainly concerns issues of ‘manipulability’ and ‘reification’, engendered by the rise of a neuroscientific vocabulary, can be found in some recent writings of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and particularly in three subsequent papers –‘Faith and Knowledge’ (2003), ‘Freedom and Determinism’ (2008) and a third one on the concept of nature in Adorno (2008). In the wake of the intellectual legacy of critical theorists (from Lukacs, to Horkheimer and Adorno, up today to Axel Honneth) who have explored the ways in which the ‘penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 1) is related to political issues of ‘domination’, Habermas has criticized ‘the objectivating language of neurobiology’ that ‘attributes the grammatical role formerly played by the “I” to the “brain” ’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 152). Habermas's concern is that an ‘empiricist language’, one that aims to transform a discursive event ‘into a natural one that takes place “behind the backs” of subject’ (for instance describing it in terms of neural firings), may cause a growing colonization of the mentalistic language – which is ‘a language that includes predicates such as “believes”, “convinces”, “approves” and “rejects” ’. This ‘dualism of language games’, that is of causes versus reasons, remains for Habermas at all effects ‘inescapable (2008, pp. 157–158), something that cannot be replaced ‘by the naturalistic image of neural processes in the brain’ (Habermas, 2008, pp. 205–206, my italics). ‘Thoughts that can be expressed in mentalistic terms’ Habermas claims ‘cannot be translated without loss of meaning into an empirical vocabulary geared to things and events’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 167). However, beneath the surface of these more idiosyncratic reactions to neuroscience, Habermas identifies a very specific point that confers originality to his criticism, clearly distinguishing it from the others previously illustrated in my cartography. I refer here to the concept of Unverfügbarkeit (Unavailability) that Habermas draws from Adorno to emphasize features of inner and subjective nature that are not open to ‘technological manipulation’ and can therefore resist the kind of ‘causal determination’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 184) that is typical, for instance, of the neurobiological style of inquiry. Through recourse to the opposition of availability-unavailability, Habermas's goal is to underline how the penetration of a scientific understanding, by spreading ‘the concept of causation’, directly ‘intermeshes’ with instrumental action and therefore produces reification: ‘When we interpret the succession of two observable states of the world, A and B, as causal relation (…) we implicitly assume that we could give rise to state B ourselves by intervening instrumentally in the world to produce state A’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 168). In their subsuming ‘surrounding nature under the concepts of causality’ the natural sciences, Habermas writes, reduce nature to be ‘technologically manipulable’ (2008, p. 199). It is exactly ‘this interventionist background of the concept of causation’ that ‘makes clear why mental states and semantic contents, which cannot be manipulated instrumentally like things and events, elude this sort of causal explanation’ (Habermas, 2008, p. 168). In this sense a critique of the neuroscientific language represents, for Habermas, a political barrier against the risks of technical manipulation, domination and reification.
Although the word ‘ideology’ may sound pejorative, I use it here in a technical sense to extend, to a scientific programme, Gramsci's idea (already present in Aristotle, in truth) that ‘everyone is a philosopher, though in his own way and unconsciously, since even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in “language”, there is contained a specific conception of the world’ (1971, p. 9, my italics). Bringing to light a similar nexus of neuroscientific language and implicit conception of the world (also not dissimilar to Althusser's ‘spontaneous philosophy of scientists’: 1967/1990, to which I have already referred in this text) is what is meant here by expressions like ‘broader ideological horizon’ and ‘ideological offer’ of the neuroscientific research-programme. That a certain science may have an ideological pendant does not mean anything particularly derogatory here, as if one could think of having a science (in a perfectly positivistic stance) without any metaphysical or normative kernel.
I thank the anonymous referees and editors of Subjectivity for bringing to my attention the paper of Papoulias and Callard (2010).
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Acknowledgements
This article has been developed over a long period in which I benefited, first, from a European Neuroscience and Society Network research grant (funded by the European Science Foundation), and then a 2-year Marie Curie IEF (FP7-PEOPLE-IEF-2008: research titled ‘The Emergence of a Biosociety’) that was carried out at the Institute for Science and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Nottingham. Many thanks to Andrew Turner for his help with the English language in the text and to the anonymous referees of Subjectivity for their very helpful criticisms.
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Meloni, M. Philosophical implications of neuroscience: The space for a critique. Subjectivity 4, 298–322 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2011.8
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