Personal and Sub-Personal: Overcoming Explanatory Apartheid

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscientific research provides a rich source of findings that require philosophical reflection. The meeting of philosophy and neuroscience raises different questions, including that of how neuroscientific discoveries can impact philosophical accounts of mental phenomena. An influential answer to this question proceeds through distinguishing between a personal and a sub-personal level of explanation (Dennett, Content and Consciousness, 1969). The thought, very roughly, is that we can distinguish a personal level of explanation, which is the proper province of philosophy, and that neuroscientific explanations, however interesting, are to be confined to the sub-personal level. Such a move simultaneously allows us to recognize the contribution of neuroscience, and also to contain it, so that it does not challenge the explanatory ambitions of philosophy. I will examine two instances of this strategy from McDowell (Philosophical Quarterly 44(175):190–205, 1994) and Hornsby (Philosophical Explorations, 3(1): 6–24, 2000). They employ the distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation to institute a kind of explanatory apartheid between the two levels. I argue that their arguments for explanatory apartheid fail. This allows us to see why the choice between isolationism and eliminativism is a false dilemma.