Abstract

Driven by an appreciation of the field’s early stage of development, I apply the concept of exploratory experimentation, originally put forward in the late 90s philosophy of biology, to current research in cognitive neuroscience. I concentrate on functional magnetic resonance imaging and how this wide-spread technique is used, from experimental design to data analysis. I claim that, although subject to certain significant modifications with respect to the concept’s original rendering, the exploratory character of neuroimaging experiments can be appreciated considering their goals, centered on the stabilization of experimental systems for phenomenological description, and the relevance of their methodological facet. Although I do not claim that there is a specific kind of experiment that one can single out as definitely exploratory, exploration can be seen as a general trait imbuing fMRI-based experimentation.

Highlights

  • Still mostly uncharted territory, the philosophical analysis of experimental practices in cognitive neuroscience has a deep theoretical relevance, mainly due to their known complexity and their rapidly changing dynamics

  • Considering the extensive use of functional neuroimaging in the field, its exploratory character, such as I portray it, may put the actual goals pursued in current research under a different light: In particular, how relevant the identification of empirical regularities is, understood here as a primary experimental goal, over and above explanatory goals

  • I laid out my views on how the concept of exploratory experimentation can help characterize the experimental side of contemporary functional neuroimaging based cognitive neuroscience

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Summary

Introduction

Still mostly uncharted territory, the philosophical analysis of experimental practices in cognitive neuroscience has a deep theoretical relevance, mainly due to their known complexity and their rapidly changing dynamics. The dominant tendency, as Wright (2017) has recently noted, has been one of skeptical, critical evaluation on fMRI’s potential to study how cognitive function relates to the brain While this critical stance comprises firmly skeptical positions on the interpretation of experimental results (such as Uttal [2001], or Hardcastle and Stewart [2002], and Stewart and Hardcastle [2005]) as well as more moderate warnings on the current use of the technique and its limitations (such as Klein [2010], or Aktunç [2014]), it is only recently that philosophers have begun to adopt a more constructive philosophical approach to their analysis of fMRI. Klein (2010b) touches on the issue, contrasting interpretations of neuroimaging as either confirmatory or exploratory, but doesn’t lay out precisely in what sense and to what extent we are understanding it as exploratory While these are relevant, early suggestions, to my knowledge there haven’t been any detailed philosophical analyses of the concept of exploratory experimentation as applied to cognitive neuroscience and functional neuroimaging. I will elaborate on the idea of a characteristic exploratory profile of fMRI-based experimentation, that draws it away from experimentation classically conceived as a tool to test highly elaborated hypotheses via some associated theory

Exploratory experimentation
On fMRI-based experiments’ goals
On fMRI-based experiments’ methodological focus
Conclusion

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