Content uploaded by Tibor Solymosi
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Tibor Solymosi on Sep 16, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Introduction
John R. Shook and Tibor Solymosi
I
is volume brings together some pragmatist philosophers vitally interested
in neuroscience and the brain sciences generally. Pragmatism is a perennial
philosophy precisely because its core views on experience, cognition, learning,
knowledge, values, psychological and education development, inter-personal
relationships, and social organization enjoy regular conrmation by evolu-
tionary biology, developmental psychology, experimental sociology, and the
brain sciences, including recent developments in neuroscience. Pragmatism has
been “refuted” by a parade of rival philosophies (most now forgotten or feeble),
but it has only been strengthened by the sciences.
Some of this volume’s chapters remind us how America’s rst generation of
pragmatists did not stumble onto its principles but instead designed them in
light of novel discoveries in biology and psychology. Viewing organisms entirely
naturalistically and understanding human brains in light of evolution, forced
this rst generation to radically re-conceive how intelligence works, during the
period from the mid-1860s to the 1890s. e pragmatists were America’s rst
cognitive scientists. Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George
Mead knew the laboratory intimately. ey all published their research in
experimental psychology and sociology, as did many of their graduate students.
ey possessed few details on the specic functions of the brain’s many compo-
nents, but they were innocent of errors that philosophers have continued to
perpetuate. For example, the pragmatists noticed how the brain grows and
changes during infancy and youth, and they gured that brains grow and modify
nervous connections throughout the lifetime. ey presumed correctly the basic
idea behind the Hebbian theory that brain tissues activated together during
activity would be more likely to stay functionally related and useful for activity
thereaer. ey inferred that the expansion of experience and the growth of
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 1 20/01/2014 09:23
2 Pragmatist Neurophilosophy
brain structure were correlated, explaining how learning consists of acquisition
of workable habits for practical success in managing environing conditions.
ese pragmatists also thought that much of the brain’s work has little to do
with self-consciousness and oen occurs at nonconscious levels. ey therefore
denied that cognition consists entirely of internal representations about static
external matters rationalistically manipulated within a Cartesian theater, and
they also rejected the notion that perception, cognition, emotion, and volition
were discrete processes. eir psychologies were both mildly behavioristic and
socially oriented, emphasizing how most distinctly human capacities from
language to science depend on social training, extended cognition, experi-
mental problem-solving, and cultural accumulation of knowledge. Outspoken
on knowledge and truth, their varieties of pragmatism claimed that only social
groups set working criteria for truth and produce knowledge from coordinated
experimental inquiry.
Pragmatism never dominated philosophy, and it was displaced from
philosophy departments by later successive empiricisms, phenomenologies,
neo-Kantianisms, neo-dualisms, and analytic rationalisms. Yet pragmatism
was never eclipsed where it was designed to shine and oer its transformative
standpoints. Its psychological functionalism, social behaviorism, and evolu-
tionary anthropology ltered into many of the social sciences, and permanently
re-directed them during the twentieth century. Developmental psychology,
experimental psychology, and cognitive science re-invigorated many pragmatist
views of brain cognition, learning, and knowledge growth in the 1980s and
1990s. e rst decades of the twenty-rst century are accelerating this trend
back to pragmatism. Since active scientists are less concerned with the history
or philosophical aspects of their particular elds, it comes as no surprise that
most behavioral and brain scientists are presently unaware of pragmatism.
However, it is no coincidence that their theoretical advances are consistent with
pragmatism, and they oen nd themselves defending pragmatist themes. Is
this all just a coincidence, a matter of curiosity for intellectual historians?
e broad tradition of pragmatism is needed now, more than ever. As each
of the chapters emphasizes in dierent ways, knowledge of brain function rarely
stays within narrow scientic bounds, nor does it remain free from philo-
sophical interference and commentary. Scientists should participate in those
broader debates to the extent they wish, just as the classical pragmatists did, and
current scientists can benet from their earlier philosophical explorations across
the same territory. But those explorations always meet staunch resistance. Rival
philosophical views, some disguised within scientic paradigms and others
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 2 20/01/2014 09:23
Introduction 3
openly espoused by armchair philosophers, oer up staunch opposition to the
new pragmatist stances all over again. Defenses of core themes and theories
of pragmatism based on the cognitive and brain sciences can be collectively
labeled as “pragmatist neurophilosophy.” When those scientically conrmed
matters are not only applied for justifying pragmatist views, but additionally
formulated to dominate the eld of neurophilosophy, in turn, philosophy itself,
then the specialized label is Neuropragmatism.
Pragmatism in general has allied with the science-arming philosophy of
naturalism. Naturalism is perennially tested by challenges questioning its ability
to accommodate and account for several philosophical questions, ranging from
knowledge to personhood. Neuropragmatism is in a good position to evaluate
those challenges. Neuropragmatism is no adjunct or aspect of neurophilosophy—
it is its own complete neurophilosophy, and hence radically recongures all of
philosophy. Neither pragmatist neurophilosophy nor Neuropragmatism has
the unhelpful agenda of “verifying” abstract principles of pragmatism with
selective neuroscience, and they do not rest their plausibility on the fads and
fashions of prexing “neuro” to any subject-matter. ere is no hidden agenda
for presuming that the sciences of the small (of neurons, synapses, molecules,
electrons, etc.) entirely dictate what is actually happening in the world, or that
the sciences can eliminate as unreal “hard” problems of perennial philosophy,
such as the origin of consciousness and the normativity of reason.
Neuropragmatism does contribute to the defense of a general naturalistic
outlook in philosophy against criticisms striking deeply at the coherence of
any naturalistic theory of learning and reasoning. e toughest criticisms
accuse naturalism of somehow denying the reality of experience and the value
of consciousness, the supposed source of all information for learning, and
also denying the authority of reasoning in generating knowledge. If any philo-
sophical naturalism judges that experience is unreal or that reasoning lacks
normative authority, then learning could not be possible, at least any sort of
learning that naturalism would countenance.
e essays in this volume touch upon many particular aspects of these issues.
Most are critical of the reductionist tendency found not only in contemporary
(neuro)philosophy and science but also in popular appropriations of neuro-
science. Other common themes among the chapters are a deep suspicion of
Cartesianism, from the stark separation of mind/body or mind/world to the
role of representation in doing cognitive science. But the commonalities do
not imply that there is one single and unied platform for pragmatist neuro-
philosophy presented across all of the authors’ contributions. Many theoretical
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 3 20/01/2014 09:23
4 Pragmatist Neurophilosophy
perspectives and approaches to philosophical puzzles are oered here, informed
by each author’s unique background. Some authors focus on a particular
thinker; others on an idea or method, or set of ideas and/or methods. Still
others draw on the sciences in imaginative ways. Of course, all the contributors
make use of these approaches, yet each accomplishes their results in his or her
own way. Pragmatism, old and new: pragmatist neurophilosophy as a research
program is quite young, but its core philosophical strategies are indebted to an
old tradition with numerous intellectual contributions to its credit.
II
Part One focuses on central historical gures of pragmatism, namely Charles
Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. ese thinkers appear through
the other chapters as well, along with pragmatic-minded thinkers such as
George Herbert Mead, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Robert Brandom.
Perhaps most striking about these three initial chapters is that, although they are
historical, they are also most timely, in light of advances in complexity theory,
dynamic systems theory, and neuroaesthetics, which enlarge pragmatism’s
explanatory scope.
John Kaag highlights some of the important insights Charles Sanders Peirce
made on the nature of neuronal adaptation and learning. Importantly, Kaag
argues, Peirce not only anticipated Hebb’s rule (that neurons that re together,
wire together), he also saw beyond Hebb’s initial conception to the need for
further qualications. Kaag aligns Peirce’s early insights with the mathematical
views of contemporary thinkers, such as Steven Strogratz. Both thinkers
endorse the view that, in order to understand how the brain works, complex
and nonlinear dynamics are integral. is is a view that has largely been ignored
by analytic philosophy of mind, and one that mainstream cognitive science is
starting to appreciate. Kaag situates Peirce’s ideas within this contemporary
context such that those interested in Peirce’s views on early cognitive science
and those interested in what Peirce has to oer contemporary cognitive science
are both unlikely to be disappointed.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone uses William James’s views about the relationship
between mind and brain to combat the orthodox reductionism and brain-
centrism of contemporary neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy.
Beginning with the analogy James drew between breathing and thinking and
emoting, Sheets-Johnstone guides us through James’s exploration of the various
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 4 20/01/2014 09:23
Introduction 5
intricacies and diculties in developing a science of experience. Central to her
argument is recent work in coordinating dynamics, which emphasizes both
the importance of an emergentist top-down approach to causation as well as
the standard reductionist bottom-up approach. at is, as James anticipated
and recent research into brain-body-world dynamics is showing today, there is
much more to being human and cultivating a self-understanding than what the
brain or inquiry into it can tell us alone.
Finishing up Part One and setting the scene for Part Two, Russell Pryba
provides an analysis of aesthetics and neuroscience from a Deweyan perspective.
He begins with an elaboration on Dewey’s version of naturalism, emphasizing
the important relationship between science and art. With this framework in
hand, he reviews the main positions in neuroaesthetics and nds them wanting.
Pryba points the way forward for doing neuroaesthetics that does justice to
both the lived experience of art and what neuroscience can attribute to both the
experience and its further understanding.
Part Two focuses on the relationship between philosophy and neuroscience,
specically advancing the pragmatist project of reconstruction. is project is
concerned with what we humans are to make of the deluge of data coming from
the sciences of life and mind. e rst two chapters of this section explicitly take
up, develop, and apply the philosophical method of reconstruction. e spirit of
these two chapters is met by the next, whose authors make a clarion call for an
imaginative reconstruction of contemporary science of mind.
Tibor Solymosi provides a historical sketch of philosophical conceptions of
experience, contrasting the sensationalistic empiricism of Hume (and other
modern philosophers) with the radical empiricism of James and Dewey.
Solymosi makes the charge that despite their eorts, both neopragmatists and
neurophilosophers cannot escape the Cartesian framework behind sensation-
alism. is inability leads to the problem of reconciling diametrically dened
projects—what Wilfrid Sellars called the scientic and manifest images. is
problem of reconciliation has led to the proposed solution of neurophiloso-
phers known as eliminative materialism. Neopragmatists reject the authority
of science yet oer an eliminativism of their own: a linguistic variety Solymosi
refers to as eliminative idealism. Neither neopragmatists nor neurophilosophers
have made much headway in their project of reconciliation. Solymosi contends
this is due to a failure to appreciate the full impact of Darwinism on the
relationship between experience and the world. Solymosi contrasts the project
of reconciliation with the project of reconstruction. To illustrate this contrast,
Solymosi critically assesses the work of a recent popular book of neuroscience
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 5 20/01/2014 09:23
6 Pragmatist Neurophilosophy
by the neuroscientist David Eagleman. rough this assessment, Solymosi
argues that neuropragmatism is the way forward for pragmatism because it, like
classical pragmatism but unlike neopragmatism and neurophilosophy, has the
tools for critically assessing scientic data in an ameliorative fashion.
e project of reconstruction is further elaborated upon by Mark Tschaepe.
In his chapter, the target is the new subeld of neuroeconomics. Tschaepe
provides a useful survey of how the literature has developed on the neurotrans-
mitter, oxytocin, from it being statistically correlated with human experiences
like trust to it being the primary cause of not just trust but the entirety of human
morality. Tschaepe then applies the reconstructive method to this literature. He
balances the excitement of this new data with a healthy skepticism, making the
case that more research can be done once we understand the role neurotrans-
mitters play in situations having to do with humans and trust.
Empirical psychologists Eric P. Charles, Andrew D. Wilson, and Sabrina
Golonka have one great hope for neuropragmatism: that it can provide a
coherent language for describing the role of the brain in basic, embodied,
embedded cognitive processes. An ever-increasing number of neuroscientists
realize that cognitive-psychology traditions are a dead end. ey tire of reading
cog-neuro publications sandwiching brilliant methods and solid results between
incoherent introductions and conclusions. e current mess makes it dicult
to integrate research lines, and cumulative progress suers. Charles, Wilson and
Golonka argue that we neuropragmatists and empiral psychologists can oer
some guidance as to the new language that is needed, for much work remains to
be done. is chapter takes the reconstructive project to a more abstract level by
raising questions about the very discipline of cognitive science itself, its under-
lying metaphors and assumptions, and subsequent aims of inquiry. Drawing on
pragmatists like Peirce, James, and E. B. Holt, the authors raise a constructive
challenge, not only to the whole of cognitive science but to neuropragmatism as
well. eir hope is that neuropragmatists can help facilitate much needed cross-
disciplinary dialog as well as critical philosophical reection.
Part ree investigates further consequences of this pragmatist alternative to
orthodox cognitive science and neuroscience. Inspired by classical pragmatism,
the authors of these chapters tackle contemporary issues in cognitive science
(broadly construed) and philosophy of mind. ese authors point to several
possible avenues of further research for neuropragmatism.
Tim Rohrer continues the constructive criticism of contemporary cognitive
science by situating pragmatism and functionalism in the history and philosophy
of science, particularly with regard to psychology’s historical development.
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 6 20/01/2014 09:23
Introduction 7
is context setting also draws on the larger historico-cultural events of the
twentieth century, emphasizing as Dewey oen did that science takes place
within a larger human context. Rohrer argues that James and Dewey’s contri-
butions to pragmatism were rooted in not just empirical science, but in their
concrete observations of the human body. Rohrer continues his analysis by
noting that philosophy and functionalist psychology, which once organically
emerged from an embodied pragmatic standpoint, were uprooted in the latter
half of the twentieth century by information theory and the conception of the
mind and brain as a particular sort of digital computer. However, the cognitive
sciences’ recent return to the empirical methods of the cognitive neurosciences
has engendered a resurgent investigation into how our embodiment shapes our
thinking.
F. omas Burke takes an alternative route to the problem of representation
to that oered by the previous two chapters. Where these authors advocate
a rejection of representation because of the historical and contemporary
confusions surrounding the word’s use, Burke aims to reconstruct our use by
appealing to mental externalism. Drawing on work in extended theory of mind,
Burke bridges these contemporary arguments with the insights of John Dewey
and George Herbert Mead. His reconstruction of mentation as something
that goes on with our bodies in our worlds—and not something stuck in the
head—oers an alternative to both orthodox cognitive science and the anti-
representationalism found in varieties of pragmatism and in unorthodox
positions within cognitive science.
David ompson articulates a pragmatism that critically incorporates
insights from Continental philosophy and neopragmatism, bridging Husserl
and Merleau-Ponty with Brandom. To do this, ompson begins by arguing
that an organism lives in a world-for-the-organism (umwelt) that is dened by
its needs and capacities rather than by physical principles. Even the simplest
organism constitutes objects that correlate with the internal structures that
unify the organism and enable perception and action. Both objects-for-the-
organism and the organism itself are functional entities that are attributed their
roles by the overall ecosystem. e functionality is normative and can only be
understood by reference to evolutionary history. To make his case, ompson
builds a useful evolutionary heuristic from molecules to amoebas to bees and
owers. From this heuristic, he establishes the continuity between human
cultures and their biology: in short, he evades the Sellarsian clash of scientic
and manifest images and continues the reconstructive project of elaborating
continuities. He extends his treatment of biological organisms and objects to
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 7 20/01/2014 09:23
8 Pragmatist Neurophilosophy
humans, concluding that human selves live in social worlds in which objects
and actions are constituted by their cultural meanings.
In the closing chapter, John R. Shook tackles a dicult question with an
equally complex history. In asking whether experience is objective, subjective,
or both, Shook seeks to return experience to a status amenable to scientic
inquiry, as pragmatism has always expected. e way that science can inves-
tigate multiple perspectives on nature permits it to inquire into anything
in human experience, including that experience, and coordinate theoretical
results with each other. Scientic inquiry into experience may not look quite
the way modern empiricists or Cartesian rationalists may expect. e brain
sciences are discovering how and why embodied and dynamic organisms
within co-responding environments generate aware experience as their nervous
systems engage with outer events, and not inner neural states. Experience
is therefore acquiring a respectably scientic status because the location,
dimensions, and properties of experiences are amenable to detection and exper-
imentation. Experience is all-natural, but it isn’t in the head. Shook infers that,
because the brain does not think about the brain, experience is not in the head,
but embedded in the environing world. e smallest proper unit of experience
cannot be some set of enervated brain states or any kind of representational
content, but an environing situation having a live organism embedded in it.
Because the sciences are able to objectively study cognition and experience,
each has a valid but perspectival eld of research, neither the elimination nor
reduction of experience will be possible, and these sciences must coordinate
their knowledge together instead.
III
Central to pragmatism is a doctrine of fallibilism. e essays collected here are
among the rst attempts to critically assess the impressive advances of neuro-
science and their implications for both neurophilosophy and all of philosophy.
Still in its infancy, the import of neuroscience cannot be taken lightly because
there is much more involved here than intellectual speculation or edication. As
Dewey oen noted, and the authors of these chapters are keenly aware, science is
a human activity performed in a human context that is not always—nor neces-
sarily—virtuous. With President Barack Obama’s calling for signicant funding
for the study of the brain, the need for a constructively critical perspective on
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 8 20/01/2014 09:23
Introduction 9
neuroscience is ever greater. We believe the essays here are a very strong and
impressive place to start.
e editors have several people to thank for making this volume possible.
Not only do we thank the contributors, we also thank our editors at Bloomsbury,
James Giordano of Georgetown University, and our ever-supportive friends and
families.
9781472511058_txt_print.indd 9 20/01/2014 09:23