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Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language
In Neuroscience and Philosophy three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker's Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003), which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond.
Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness.
In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, Neuroscience and Philosophy is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience.
Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness.
In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, Neuroscience and Philosophy is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
39 people are currently reading
934 people want to read
About the author
Maxwell Richard Bennett
8 books23 followersProfessor Maxwell Bennett is an internationally renowned neuroscientist and expert on the history and philosophy of brain and mind research. He has had a long-standing interest in studying the functioning of synapses and a wider philosophical interest in the relationship between the brain and our psychological attributes such as thinking, remembering and perceiving. Among his major research contributions is the discovery of non-adrenergic non-cholinergic (NANC) neurotransmitters and elucidation of their mechanisms of action, which has had profound implications for the treatment of visceral and vascular disorders. His current research is investigating synaptic functioning in neuropsychiatric diseases including post-traumatic stress disorder. His team was the first to demonstrate that stress leads to the loss of synapses in certain parts of the brain and in turn, to the loss of grey matter seen via neuroimaging in PTSD patients. His philosophical studies challenge traditional paradigms of brain science, which attribute psychological capabilities such as thinking, perceiving and remembering, to the brain. Instead he says “it is the person who possesses these attributes, while the brain facilitates expression of these abilities”. Professor Bennett’s pioneering work on the physiology, development and plasticity of synapses, led to him being awarded by the Australian Government in 1980, the first and largest Centre of Research Excellence (of the 10 established within Australian universities). In 2000 he was elected to the first University Chair ‘for research recognized internationally as of exceptional distinction’. As Founding Director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute (BMRI), Professor Bennett cemented his vision of bringing together psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists and patients, to facilitate collaborative research and patient management. He has founded numerous other organizations and authored several books on the history and philosophy of the brain sciences, and on science policy.
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May 15, 2012
This book is a good ‘ol fashion philosophers slugfest at its best. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
T.H. Huxley famously said:
Along come Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and they write a book about how they are displeased with this pervasive aspect of neuroscientific terminology and its use by not only neuroscientists, but neuro-friendly philosophers as well. They argue that it’s not specific areas of the brain that see or hear or feel or remember; it is people that do! These are attributes of human beings, not of their brains. The brain is simply not an appropriate subject for psychological predicates, and making it so has serious consequences for both neuroscience and philosophy according to Bennett and Hacker. It leads us down dead ends and makes research difficult, if not futile.
Bennett and Hacker place the blame for this state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of Descartes. Ask any neuroscientist and they will strongly deny the plausibility of a dualistic theory of mind. And yet, the predicates which used to be ascribed to an immaterial mind, neuroscientists unreflectively ascribe to the brain instead. They replaced mind/body dualism with brain/body dualism, retaining the same basic structure. And so there is talk about maps in the brain, symbols, representations, information, etc…but the fact that certain features of the visual field can be mapped onto the firing of groups of neurons in a particular brain region does not mean that these maps actually “exist” in the brain, and that the brain actually “uses” these maps to “formulate hypotheses” about what is visible.
Now, with that out of the way, here’s where things get interesting. In this book by Bennett and Hacker, they devote two whole sections to criticizing the views of Daniel Dennett and John Searle, respectively. And two years after publishing this book, they were invited to participate in a special session of the meeting of the American Philosophical Association entitled “Authors and Critics,” where their critics were, you guessed it, Dennett and Searle. Dennett and Searle dug into them over the course of this session through prepared remarks and questions, and some time later, Bennett and Hacker published their own “reply to the rebuttals” stemming from this conference. This book is that fight, laid out for our amusement, and education. The first part is a few specific selections from Bennett and Hacker’s original book, followed up by Dennett and Searle’s responses. Dennett and Searle don’t pull any punches in their criticisms, and Bennett and Hacker then fire right back. So the book ends up being worth it both for the show, and for the great philosophical work presented by a group of great thinkers.
Dennett and Searle (writing separately) make for some strange bedfellows given that Searle’s Biological Naturalism and Dennett’s functionalism (of the computational variety?) stand in strong opposition to each other. Searle’s formulation of the Chinese Room was in direct response to computational functionalist accounts of mind, and Dennett’s Intentional Stance, taken to its extreme ascribes beliefs and desires to lawn mowers and thermostats. And yet both agree that Bennett and Hacker are way off. Go figure that you have two philosophers defending neuroscience against the attack of a neuroscientist! But these are two great (scientifically minded) philosophers, and their criticizisms of Bennett and Hacker did the job of softening my support for them.
One that sticks out is Searle’s criticism of certain aspects of Bennett and Hacker’s positions in regards to the location of conscious experience. If you cut your foot, to Bennett and Hacker, the answer to the question of “where is your pain?” is an obvious one…It’s in your foot! But Searle brings up the point that there are people who are missing limbs who feel pain in their phantom limb. Where is their pain located? Bennett and Hacker say the pain is located where the person’s foot would have been. But Searle finds this ridiculous. The pain is then in the bed or under the sheet, it exists in a location where no part of the person’s physical body exists. Searle says that it only makes sense to say that the pain exists in the person’s brain. And this is true of someone with a real foot as much as it is of someone with a phantom foot. There’s an intuitive appeal here. Damage to your foot is just that, damage. For there to be pain, a signal has to be sent up to the brain. Stop that signal from reaching the brain, and the person feels no pain. So it does seem that the pain isn’t really *in* the foot, but rather, damage to the foot causes you to have an experience of pain, where it feels to you that the pain exists in the foot.
I happen to think that all of the responsible parties are wrong about the location of subjective experience. I’m not entirely convinced that it even makes sense to ascribe a location to subjective experience. As Dan Dennett so humorously and engagingly points out in his essay “Where Am I,” the question of *where* the self exists is not so easily answered, and our intuitions often pull us in contradictory directions. Regardless though, it does seem that Bennett and Hacker are more obviously in the wrong on this one. Bennett and Hacker also make some surprising claims about the lack of qualitative character associated with many perceptual experiences. They deny the almost standard philosophical maxim that there is a “something it’s like” character to all our conscious experiences. They argue that there might not be something that it’s like for someone to see something, or hear something. Dennett and Searle rightly criticize them on this, though in a small footnote they make an interesting point about the distinction they’re trying to draw with this.
This was a great read, both because you get to see some philosophical heavyweights duking it out, and because they cover some fascinating topics in neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. I didn’t explicitly cover much of this last topic, but the specter of Wittgenstein was summoned regularly, and interestingly, by all parties involved. How these philosophers can all be so influenced by Wittgenstein, while simultaneously disagreeing with each other so much, was an amusement in its own right.
T.H. Huxley famously said:
“how it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp”In recent decades the field of neuroscience has proclaimed to have a gone a long way towards answering this question. We have studied the inner workings of the brain and have been able to correlate neuronal activity in certain areas of the brain with specific cognitive processes. Knocking out the activity of certain areas prevents a person from engaging in the cognitive processes correlated with (controlled by?) that area. The visual cortex is responsible for vision. The auditory cortex is responsible for hearing. Memories are stored in the hippocampus and fear is in your amygdala. And so it is that the brain, or parts of it, see or hear, think or believe, hope and fear, plan and decide.
Along come Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and they write a book about how they are displeased with this pervasive aspect of neuroscientific terminology and its use by not only neuroscientists, but neuro-friendly philosophers as well. They argue that it’s not specific areas of the brain that see or hear or feel or remember; it is people that do! These are attributes of human beings, not of their brains. The brain is simply not an appropriate subject for psychological predicates, and making it so has serious consequences for both neuroscience and philosophy according to Bennett and Hacker. It leads us down dead ends and makes research difficult, if not futile.
Bennett and Hacker place the blame for this state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of Descartes. Ask any neuroscientist and they will strongly deny the plausibility of a dualistic theory of mind. And yet, the predicates which used to be ascribed to an immaterial mind, neuroscientists unreflectively ascribe to the brain instead. They replaced mind/body dualism with brain/body dualism, retaining the same basic structure. And so there is talk about maps in the brain, symbols, representations, information, etc…but the fact that certain features of the visual field can be mapped onto the firing of groups of neurons in a particular brain region does not mean that these maps actually “exist” in the brain, and that the brain actually “uses” these maps to “formulate hypotheses” about what is visible.
“by speaking about the brain’s thinking and reasoning, about one hemisphere’s knowing something and not informing the other, about the brain’s making decisions without the person’s knowing, about rotating mental images in mental space, and so forth, neuroscientists are fostering a form of mystification and cultivating a neuro-mythology that are altogether deplorable.”
Now, with that out of the way, here’s where things get interesting. In this book by Bennett and Hacker, they devote two whole sections to criticizing the views of Daniel Dennett and John Searle, respectively. And two years after publishing this book, they were invited to participate in a special session of the meeting of the American Philosophical Association entitled “Authors and Critics,” where their critics were, you guessed it, Dennett and Searle. Dennett and Searle dug into them over the course of this session through prepared remarks and questions, and some time later, Bennett and Hacker published their own “reply to the rebuttals” stemming from this conference. This book is that fight, laid out for our amusement, and education. The first part is a few specific selections from Bennett and Hacker’s original book, followed up by Dennett and Searle’s responses. Dennett and Searle don’t pull any punches in their criticisms, and Bennett and Hacker then fire right back. So the book ends up being worth it both for the show, and for the great philosophical work presented by a group of great thinkers.
Dennett and Searle (writing separately) make for some strange bedfellows given that Searle’s Biological Naturalism and Dennett’s functionalism (of the computational variety?) stand in strong opposition to each other. Searle’s formulation of the Chinese Room was in direct response to computational functionalist accounts of mind, and Dennett’s Intentional Stance, taken to its extreme ascribes beliefs and desires to lawn mowers and thermostats. And yet both agree that Bennett and Hacker are way off. Go figure that you have two philosophers defending neuroscience against the attack of a neuroscientist! But these are two great (scientifically minded) philosophers, and their criticizisms of Bennett and Hacker did the job of softening my support for them.
One that sticks out is Searle’s criticism of certain aspects of Bennett and Hacker’s positions in regards to the location of conscious experience. If you cut your foot, to Bennett and Hacker, the answer to the question of “where is your pain?” is an obvious one…It’s in your foot! But Searle brings up the point that there are people who are missing limbs who feel pain in their phantom limb. Where is their pain located? Bennett and Hacker say the pain is located where the person’s foot would have been. But Searle finds this ridiculous. The pain is then in the bed or under the sheet, it exists in a location where no part of the person’s physical body exists. Searle says that it only makes sense to say that the pain exists in the person’s brain. And this is true of someone with a real foot as much as it is of someone with a phantom foot. There’s an intuitive appeal here. Damage to your foot is just that, damage. For there to be pain, a signal has to be sent up to the brain. Stop that signal from reaching the brain, and the person feels no pain. So it does seem that the pain isn’t really *in* the foot, but rather, damage to the foot causes you to have an experience of pain, where it feels to you that the pain exists in the foot.
I happen to think that all of the responsible parties are wrong about the location of subjective experience. I’m not entirely convinced that it even makes sense to ascribe a location to subjective experience. As Dan Dennett so humorously and engagingly points out in his essay “Where Am I,” the question of *where* the self exists is not so easily answered, and our intuitions often pull us in contradictory directions. Regardless though, it does seem that Bennett and Hacker are more obviously in the wrong on this one. Bennett and Hacker also make some surprising claims about the lack of qualitative character associated with many perceptual experiences. They deny the almost standard philosophical maxim that there is a “something it’s like” character to all our conscious experiences. They argue that there might not be something that it’s like for someone to see something, or hear something. Dennett and Searle rightly criticize them on this, though in a small footnote they make an interesting point about the distinction they’re trying to draw with this.
This was a great read, both because you get to see some philosophical heavyweights duking it out, and because they cover some fascinating topics in neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. I didn’t explicitly cover much of this last topic, but the specter of Wittgenstein was summoned regularly, and interestingly, by all parties involved. How these philosophers can all be so influenced by Wittgenstein, while simultaneously disagreeing with each other so much, was an amusement in its own right.
June 21, 2017
The text prompted a question in me which I will attempt to answer with a bit of Philosophical acumen. Why do people inherently choose to distinguish themselves as individuals innately born with the idea of an absolute free psychological self? I’m distinguishing between the biological self and psychological self and will be using the latter. Integrated members of society rarely take their preconceived notions of self, time or identity for granted, in fact, some would claim these notions as objective truths, comparable to a tangible truth, our planet, another organism, that holds other social animals, including ourselves, which share it with other "selfs". It would seem that the self here is larger and associated with additional variables. Does the idea of a free-self extend to people who are following our orders like employees? According to CS Lewis’s a rule of thumb is to treat people how you’d like to be treated. We’re usually able to produce an immediate reaction that is proportional to our ability, in these cases our autonomy of identity and self-starts to show itself.
Here’s an example, let’s imagine a person whose dream was to make it in Hollywood; yet unfortunately suffered sudden paralysis, and no one to speak on his behalf, does that mean he lost the psychological sense of self, given he can't react and stand for his interests, ideally no. We learn that everyone still has some sense of self within them and in most cases we see a glimpse of it in times of struggle, or loss. The person in this case might've lost his dream of being in Hollywood, but his dream was never his true self. His true self is his ability to pursue life, for it is always current. So long as he embraces living, as oppose to choosing suicide, he won't be defeated by the deterministic outcome of his paralysis. Perhaps, the self is greater in today's society through influence. Meaning, your banker, secretary, lawyer, or anybody who might work for you is part of that psychological self. I’ve ultimately determined that using “Find yourself” to encourage people to follow their dreams couldn’t be more of an oxymoron. It'll only result in finding yourself trying to find yourself and wondering when it might appear. The self had always existed, and is in the making, it is complex and changing. Moreover, it can be projected throughout other selves or people, through memories and friendships. Therefore, I’ve hypothesized that the psychological self as a persisting, existing and abstract entity, is simply an illusion, albeit a very useful one that introduced individualism. For aren’t we all the universe we see.
Here’s an example, let’s imagine a person whose dream was to make it in Hollywood; yet unfortunately suffered sudden paralysis, and no one to speak on his behalf, does that mean he lost the psychological sense of self, given he can't react and stand for his interests, ideally no. We learn that everyone still has some sense of self within them and in most cases we see a glimpse of it in times of struggle, or loss. The person in this case might've lost his dream of being in Hollywood, but his dream was never his true self. His true self is his ability to pursue life, for it is always current. So long as he embraces living, as oppose to choosing suicide, he won't be defeated by the deterministic outcome of his paralysis. Perhaps, the self is greater in today's society through influence. Meaning, your banker, secretary, lawyer, or anybody who might work for you is part of that psychological self. I’ve ultimately determined that using “Find yourself” to encourage people to follow their dreams couldn’t be more of an oxymoron. It'll only result in finding yourself trying to find yourself and wondering when it might appear. The self had always existed, and is in the making, it is complex and changing. Moreover, it can be projected throughout other selves or people, through memories and friendships. Therefore, I’ve hypothesized that the psychological self as a persisting, existing and abstract entity, is simply an illusion, albeit a very useful one that introduced individualism. For aren’t we all the universe we see.
December 2, 2014
Undergraduate philosophy students will likely find this entertaining.
More advanced philosophy students will find it pedantic, repetitive, and frustrating.
Scientists will find it completely useless and shouldn't bother with it.
B&H have one point to make, and they make it over and over again. It goes like this:
"Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §281, see §§282–7, 359–61)".
That's it. That's all B&H have to say. In this volume you'll find them repeating it many times, with some quotes from pop-sci neuroscience books taken as support. Then Dennett and Searle offer some criticisms, and in response B&H repeat this same point some more.
It starts off as a compelling idea to any philosopher or neuroscientist (I'm both): a Wittgensteinian critique of conceptual errors in modern neuroscience. Goody! But after they've made the same criticism of neuroscientists' language twenty or so times, it gets hard to stick with them. Dennett and Searle's contributions are entertaining (and in the case of the former, the critique is rather devastating), by contrast B&H just seem out of their league. There are lots of assertions without even an attempt at argument (part of the "this word means X, your use sounds weird to me, you should be quiet" school of philosophy). At the end there are some rather embarrassing bits where B&H try to convince the reader "no really, scientists SAY this is just a loose way of speaking, but we know this is how they REALLY think".
Anybody's who has read Wittgenstein will find nothing new or interesting here, and anybody who hasn't would be mislead by B&H into thinking Wittgenstein's shallow. Skip B&H, there are more substantive critiques of modern neuroscience to be found elsewhere.
More advanced philosophy students will find it pedantic, repetitive, and frustrating.
Scientists will find it completely useless and shouldn't bother with it.
B&H have one point to make, and they make it over and over again. It goes like this:
"Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §281, see §§282–7, 359–61)".
That's it. That's all B&H have to say. In this volume you'll find them repeating it many times, with some quotes from pop-sci neuroscience books taken as support. Then Dennett and Searle offer some criticisms, and in response B&H repeat this same point some more.
It starts off as a compelling idea to any philosopher or neuroscientist (I'm both): a Wittgensteinian critique of conceptual errors in modern neuroscience. Goody! But after they've made the same criticism of neuroscientists' language twenty or so times, it gets hard to stick with them. Dennett and Searle's contributions are entertaining (and in the case of the former, the critique is rather devastating), by contrast B&H just seem out of their league. There are lots of assertions without even an attempt at argument (part of the "this word means X, your use sounds weird to me, you should be quiet" school of philosophy). At the end there are some rather embarrassing bits where B&H try to convince the reader "no really, scientists SAY this is just a loose way of speaking, but we know this is how they REALLY think".
Anybody's who has read Wittgenstein will find nothing new or interesting here, and anybody who hasn't would be mislead by B&H into thinking Wittgenstein's shallow. Skip B&H, there are more substantive critiques of modern neuroscience to be found elsewhere.
May 28, 2013
This is an irritating book. It is supposed to represent a debate between 2 philosophical approaches to neuroscience. One side is defended by Peter Hacker, an Oxford philosopher who is a scholar of Wittgenstein's work and a hard-line defender of what he takes Wittgenstein's position to be; and Maxwell Bennett, a neuroscientist. The other side(s) is represented by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, 2 philosophers who in different ways are advocates for the idea that neuroscience can contribute to solving philosophical issues. The views (and contributors) clashed at an American Philosophical Association symposium in 2005, and this book is supposed to recreate that clash. Hacker and Bennett had published a book, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, in 2003, and the symposium was about that book. This book, that I am reviewing, includes 45 pages of excerpts from that book, an additional essay by Bennett of 20 pages, a 24 page reply by Dennett, a 28 page reply by Searle, 40 pages of replies by H&B, and then a 25 page conclusion by the editor. It turns out that the editor gave a glowing review of the original book by H&B (p. 190), so in essence H&B's side is represented by 130 pages, and the others by 52 pages. What is worse, the 130 pages from H&B's side say pretty much the same thing over and over and over...again. The whole book is boring and unimaginative. If I thought that H&B's interpretation of Wittgenstein was right, I would never have found him interesting enough to devote the last 25 years to. In fact I was provoked to look to Wittgenstein on these issues about 30 years ago when I heard a philosopher advocating a sort of view similar to Dennett and Searle. I thought that the view was misguided and thought Wittgenstein would say why. That is indeed the line that H&B push. But what I found was that what Wittgenstein had to say about these issues was much more complicated and interesting. So I published a paper, "Wittgenstein & Neuroscience" in 1989, and another in 1999, and expanded all of that into 3 chapters (7-9) of my book, Wittgenstein in Exile. It is disappointing to see the best known scholar of Wittgenstein simply assuming a simple-minded interpretation of Wittgenstein and then using it obtusely to bludgeon others in this debate. I do not recommend this book to anyone, mostly because it contributes to the bad name that Wittgenstein has in contemporary philosophy. It is a good illustration of why I do not call myself a "Wittgensteinian." To me the term is analogous to simple-minded fundamentalism about Christianity. All this is not to say that I accept the views of either Searle or Dennett, though I find Dennett the most interesting of the debaters here. (Note, also, between pp. 84 and 85 of the book pp. 37-84 are repeated. So I guess you get more for your money!!)
December 10, 2015
I thought this book was terrible, mostly because I found that Hacker and Bennett overextended Wittgenstein's quote beyond its scope. They end up arguing that neuroscience contradicts common sense, and therefore many neuroscientific concepts or ideas must be incorrect. Not once do they consider that common sense may be mistaken, and although they claim it does not constitute a theoretical framework they establish it as the proper way of discussing human activity.
Basically I thought much of their philosophy was an attempt to shore up common sense and folk psychology rather than use scientific advance to inform and alter common sense. Ridiculous.
Basically I thought much of their philosophy was an attempt to shore up common sense and folk psychology rather than use scientific advance to inform and alter common sense. Ridiculous.
April 4, 2014
Searle and Dennett responses to the authors are interesting, but the summary form of the original book on which the controversy is based doesn't really do justice to the complexities involved. Overhwhelming sense is of really smart people talking past one another, which is a real shame.
August 5, 2013
The book reflects a debate on 'Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience' of Bennett and Hacker. Parts of it are copied in this book.
From the very first lines of their introduction Bennett and Hacker make a strong distinction between the domains of neuroscience and philosophy. In their view the first doesn't reach beyond the 'neural underpinning of human cognitive, affactive and volitional capacities', the latter is the exclusive field of investigating the logical relations between concepts, which are psychological concepts in their common field of interest. The authors seem to exclude from the beginning any contribution of the knowledge of the 'neural underpinning' to the understanding of psychological concepts.
As their guiding philosopher serves Wittgenstein, who wrote in Philosophical Investigations, number 281: "Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.' The authors combine this idea with the concept of whole/part relations and suggest that neuroscience is hold to the 'mereological (part/whole) principle'. This principle says that psychological predicates only apply to 'the human being (or animal) as a whole' and not to parts such as a brain. So, Bennett and Hacker allow to say 'the heart pumps', but not 'the brain thinks'. Applying a psychological predicate to the brain is not false, or silly or stupid, they assure. It just lacks the sense of applying these predicates to human beings and animals as a whole. Why would this be so? What is this 'whole'? What is missing in the brains thinking? Why should the thinking of my brain not be my thinking as a whole as far as the thinking is concerned?
A further explanation is given when the authors criticise scientists who say that the brain uses 'maps' or 'internal representations' to describe the world. The topographic patterns of activity in the brain are the result of causal processes, Bennett and Hacker argue, and are not governed by rules or conventions. So causality is used here as a discriminator between human and non-human activity. Could this be an echo of the dualisme of a causal and a mindful world? The authors don't reflect on this issue.
Sound criticism on Bennett and Hacker is given in two articles of Daniel D. Dennett and John Searle. These three parts together are interesting literature for any lay reader of popular publications about neuroscience.
From the very first lines of their introduction Bennett and Hacker make a strong distinction between the domains of neuroscience and philosophy. In their view the first doesn't reach beyond the 'neural underpinning of human cognitive, affactive and volitional capacities', the latter is the exclusive field of investigating the logical relations between concepts, which are psychological concepts in their common field of interest. The authors seem to exclude from the beginning any contribution of the knowledge of the 'neural underpinning' to the understanding of psychological concepts.
As their guiding philosopher serves Wittgenstein, who wrote in Philosophical Investigations, number 281: "Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.' The authors combine this idea with the concept of whole/part relations and suggest that neuroscience is hold to the 'mereological (part/whole) principle'. This principle says that psychological predicates only apply to 'the human being (or animal) as a whole' and not to parts such as a brain. So, Bennett and Hacker allow to say 'the heart pumps', but not 'the brain thinks'. Applying a psychological predicate to the brain is not false, or silly or stupid, they assure. It just lacks the sense of applying these predicates to human beings and animals as a whole. Why would this be so? What is this 'whole'? What is missing in the brains thinking? Why should the thinking of my brain not be my thinking as a whole as far as the thinking is concerned?
A further explanation is given when the authors criticise scientists who say that the brain uses 'maps' or 'internal representations' to describe the world. The topographic patterns of activity in the brain are the result of causal processes, Bennett and Hacker argue, and are not governed by rules or conventions. So causality is used here as a discriminator between human and non-human activity. Could this be an echo of the dualisme of a causal and a mindful world? The authors don't reflect on this issue.
Sound criticism on Bennett and Hacker is given in two articles of Daniel D. Dennett and John Searle. These three parts together are interesting literature for any lay reader of popular publications about neuroscience.
August 15, 2009
The Wittgensteinian attempt to clarify mental concepts in order to help out neuroscience comes off as, at best, misguided. Bennet and Hacker re-hash Wittgenstein's arguments to present a basic mereological point - that we can only meaningfully say of persons that they think, believe and so on, because it is human activity that gives the words 'think', 'believe' etc... their meaning. To say of a brain that it 'thinks' is therefore not even false - it is meaningless. It is nonesense. And so on.... The comebacks from Dennett and Searle are entertaining enough but the whole thing is somewhat pointless. The meanings of words are always extensible. They are not bounded by the behaviours that generated them, and the scientific attempt to extend meaning is not, in itself, dangerous or misguided.
October 1, 2016
I was doing a review as I went with this book but once I got through Bennett and Hacker's portion and got to the rebuttals I just gave up. I was unclear on exactly what they were arguing. I have some disagreements with Searle and Dennett but I admire Dennett and found his rebuttal simply eviscerated what had come before.
April 14, 2011
A good book when it does talk about neuroscience and philosophy but it is mainly a book about the authors arguing, which is actually quite funny in places!
October 30, 2019
A decent presentation of the mereological fallacy that is omnipresent in the cognitive sciences, esp cognitive psychology and linguistics. Peter Hacker should probably read any other philosopher besides Wittgenstein though. Too often he would quote Luki, insisting that the conceptual framework of most cognitive science is misguided, and then fail to elucidate exactly how. It is possible that in his and Bennett's larger work, the Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, they further develop the idea. In this short volume it is left to the reader to figure out why exactly the attribution of psychological predicates to neurological systems negatively affects the conceptual framework of neuroscience, leading to conceptual confusion and "nonsense" claims.
Dennett is not at his best here, dismissing the critique because cognitive science does in fact use this language, and somehow it is impossible for that many scientists to be confused. One only has to recall the entire history of science to see how foolish this is. Dennett feels that the authors have only re-branded his own personal/sub-personal distinction in cognitive science, but I think he fails to see their specific linguistic critique within this distinction, and its relevance for making sense. He also fails to respond convincingly to their classification of truth/falsity, and sense/nonsense. It is critical that the empirical questions of the mind have clear formulations (sense/nonsense) otherwise the answers to such question (truth/falsity) will be meaningless.
John Searle is honestly an idiot who has come up with one, maybe two good thought experiments in his whole career. It hurts me to even read his section in this book, especially his insistence on an identity theory of mind with again, very strange conceptual starting points (ie. "Conscious states exist in the brain" p. 99; strange as I thought IN brains were neurons, glial cells, neurotransmitters, etc.) So again, not even sure what one could mean by that claim and Searle does little to help one understand.
Overall if you follow Hacker and Bennett cognitive science is probably doomed, but there might still be a chance to save if it from its own conceptual clutter.
Dennett is not at his best here, dismissing the critique because cognitive science does in fact use this language, and somehow it is impossible for that many scientists to be confused. One only has to recall the entire history of science to see how foolish this is. Dennett feels that the authors have only re-branded his own personal/sub-personal distinction in cognitive science, but I think he fails to see their specific linguistic critique within this distinction, and its relevance for making sense. He also fails to respond convincingly to their classification of truth/falsity, and sense/nonsense. It is critical that the empirical questions of the mind have clear formulations (sense/nonsense) otherwise the answers to such question (truth/falsity) will be meaningless.
John Searle is honestly an idiot who has come up with one, maybe two good thought experiments in his whole career. It hurts me to even read his section in this book, especially his insistence on an identity theory of mind with again, very strange conceptual starting points (ie. "Conscious states exist in the brain" p. 99; strange as I thought IN brains were neurons, glial cells, neurotransmitters, etc.) So again, not even sure what one could mean by that claim and Searle does little to help one understand.
Overall if you follow Hacker and Bennett cognitive science is probably doomed, but there might still be a chance to save if it from its own conceptual clutter.
April 18, 2023
The philosophers are trying not to look like dogs, barking after science, but it is not easy for them, seeing all the research money given for science and not to them. But as far their efforts help scientists to learn speaking more carefully in public, they (the philosophers) do their job right. After I read this book, I never say "the brain does this", or "the brain does that" anymore, but instead I say "in some structures in the brain happens this or that", or "somme processes in the brain may lead to this or that", but all the discussion in the book is not about the actual language, which neuroscientists use in their labs, it is just about their speach to the media, for getting more research money, and the media don't care about some complicated speaking, they just want to know what the brain actually does.
November 20, 2013
Usually, if you have a strong position in the philosophy of mind, that means that you think that 20% of the philosophical literature on mind is right, 40% is wrong, and 40% is total nonsense. This book reaches out to a number of disparate positions and illustrates very well how those positions interact; the book starts by characterizing the work of Bennett and Hacker in the Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, focussing on some central excerpts instead of forcing a synopsis of an extensive and thoughtful piece of philosophical literature.
Because the papers are drawn from a discussion at the APA, the writing is straight to the point and very engaging. Hacker is a terrific writer, and Dennett and Searle have very strong showings. I find Dennett's writing to be strongly hit-or-miss and Searle to be too confrontational much of the time; but in the book, Dennett winds up with the most confrontational passages and Searle comes off as concessive, engaging, and thoughtful. Both come off very well in those roles, and offer some substantive criticisms both of the claims made by Bennett and Hacker on the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience (and consciousness) and also on the Oxford program in philosophy. Dennett's critique of "natural language" philosophy is one of the most substantial I've come across, and I've been looking for some time.
Overall, the book is a good read for those who are trying to get into the technical philosophical literature on mind and neuroscience, because it isn't overly technical and it illustrates some important methodological differences between groups of thinkers in the field. We get a good look at the naturalized Quinean projects like Dennett and a very explicit contrast with the more language-oriented projects of Hacker and Searle, and the contrast is brought to the forefront because of how stark the contrast is. Most thinkers in the field will fall in the middle somewhere, (except for the extremely radical, like the Churchlands, who are even more naturalized than Dennett) but it is useful to consider where on the spectrum someone falls when looking at their methodology.
For those who are familiar with the background material, the book is (at best) a look at the eccentric positions held by Hacker and Bennett, and a good way of assessing the substantive criticisms lobbed by different camps. If there's no interest in the views expressed by Hacker and Bennett, the section written by Searle is worth reading if for no other reason than it is one of the places where Searle succinctly characterizes the causal relation of mind and brain states on his view, and gives an account of his view of persons in relation to institutions. Seeing the two next to each other, and the way that Searle parlays one into the other in a small number of pages, gives a really good insight for how it is that Searle does philosophy, and how he winds up with such a coherent picture in spite of some very disparate areas of commentary. (That said, I probably wouldn't by the book just for that characterization of Searle unless you were really puzzling over his general picture and feeling frustrated by the length of his books...) Insofar as Hacker is pretty marginal in philosophy of mind and consciousness, it's probably not a major reading for anyone in the field. Insofar as Hacker has some interesting and eccentric views about neuroscience, it's a pretty cool angle to look at.
Because the papers are drawn from a discussion at the APA, the writing is straight to the point and very engaging. Hacker is a terrific writer, and Dennett and Searle have very strong showings. I find Dennett's writing to be strongly hit-or-miss and Searle to be too confrontational much of the time; but in the book, Dennett winds up with the most confrontational passages and Searle comes off as concessive, engaging, and thoughtful. Both come off very well in those roles, and offer some substantive criticisms both of the claims made by Bennett and Hacker on the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience (and consciousness) and also on the Oxford program in philosophy. Dennett's critique of "natural language" philosophy is one of the most substantial I've come across, and I've been looking for some time.
Overall, the book is a good read for those who are trying to get into the technical philosophical literature on mind and neuroscience, because it isn't overly technical and it illustrates some important methodological differences between groups of thinkers in the field. We get a good look at the naturalized Quinean projects like Dennett and a very explicit contrast with the more language-oriented projects of Hacker and Searle, and the contrast is brought to the forefront because of how stark the contrast is. Most thinkers in the field will fall in the middle somewhere, (except for the extremely radical, like the Churchlands, who are even more naturalized than Dennett) but it is useful to consider where on the spectrum someone falls when looking at their methodology.
For those who are familiar with the background material, the book is (at best) a look at the eccentric positions held by Hacker and Bennett, and a good way of assessing the substantive criticisms lobbed by different camps. If there's no interest in the views expressed by Hacker and Bennett, the section written by Searle is worth reading if for no other reason than it is one of the places where Searle succinctly characterizes the causal relation of mind and brain states on his view, and gives an account of his view of persons in relation to institutions. Seeing the two next to each other, and the way that Searle parlays one into the other in a small number of pages, gives a really good insight for how it is that Searle does philosophy, and how he winds up with such a coherent picture in spite of some very disparate areas of commentary. (That said, I probably wouldn't by the book just for that characterization of Searle unless you were really puzzling over his general picture and feeling frustrated by the length of his books...) Insofar as Hacker is pretty marginal in philosophy of mind and consciousness, it's probably not a major reading for anyone in the field. Insofar as Hacker has some interesting and eccentric views about neuroscience, it's a pretty cool angle to look at.
March 16, 2015
Overall quite enjoyable, helped put the world of scientific research into a new perspective... Which is not always a good thing.
February 18, 2016
Disappointing.
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