Neurophilosophy Research Articles

How and when are topological explanations complete mechanistic explanations? The case of multilayer network models

The relationship between topological explanation and mechanistic explanation is unclear. Most philosophers agree that at least some topological explanations are mechanistic explanations. The crucial question is how to make sense of this claim. Zednik (Philos Psychol 32(1):23–51, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2018.1512090) argues that topological explanations are mechanistic if they (i) describe mechanism sketches that (ii) pick out organizational properties of mechanisms. While we agree with Zednik’s conclusion, we critically discuss Zednik’s account and show that it fails as a general account of how and when topological explanations are mechanistic. First, if topological explanations were just mechanism sketches, this implies that they could be enriched by replacing topological terms with mechanistic detail. This, however, conflicts how topological explanations are used in scientific practice. Second, Zednik’s account fails to show how topological properties can be organizational properties of mechanisms that have a place in mechanistic explanation. The core issue is that Zednik’s account ignores that topological properties often are global properties while mechanistic explanantia refer to local properties. We demonstrate how these problems can be solved by a recent account of mechanistic completeness (Craver and Kaplan in Br J Philos Sci 71(1):287–319, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axy015; Kohár and Krickel in Calzavarini and Viola (eds) Neural mechanisms—new challenges in the philosophy of neuroscience, Springer, New York, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54092-0_17) and use a multilayer network model of Alzheimer’s Disease to illustrate this.

Neurophilosophy, Philosophy of Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: The Problem of Distinguishing

Neurophilosophy is understood as different areas of philosophy, for example, the philosophy of neuroscience, the philosophy of artificial intelligence, or eliminative materialism. This excessive interpretation of the term is due to the fact that the understanding of the subject area of this discipline is still incomplete. For example, one of the earliest definitions of neurophilosophy given by P.S. Churchland stated reduction of psychology to neurosciences. In modern views, the idea of neurophilosophy as an attempt to justify eliminative materialism is outdated and does not correspond to reality. The article analyzes the terms “philosophy of neuroscience,” “neurophilosophy,” and “philosophy of artificial intelligence” and also offers a variant of their differentiation. The authors focus on the common and different features, using the example of G.M. Edelman's theory of consciousness and the concept of connectionism for weak artificial intelligence. It is concluded that integral use of the term “neurophilosophy” should be abandoned. As a result, the term “neurophilosophy” should be understood as a direction in philosophy of the early 21st century, applying neuroscientific concepts to solve traditional philosophical problems, while the philosophy of specific neurosciences can be considered primarily as a field in the philosophy of science that formulates and solves problems of specific neurosciences as well as of the entire neuroscientific direction. The philosophy of artificial intelligence is an area in philosophy that answers the question of what non-biological intelligence is and what makes it possible; in other words, it is a philosophical and methodological basis for the study of non-biological intelligence. In the formation of neurosciences and their scientific and philosophical basis, we are still at the first methodological stage of the analysis and differentiation of hypotheses. After some time, there will emerge a philosophy of neuroscience, as the basis of all existing neuroscientific theories, and then this term will acquire greater significance.

Anaximander: The early way to nurosciences and neurophilosophy

Anaximander: The early way to nurosciences and neurophilosophy

Laser Lights and Designer Drugs: New Techniques for Descending Levels of Mechanisms "in a Single Bound"?

Optogenetics and DREADDs (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) are important research tools in recent neurobiology. These tools allow unprecedented control over activity in specifically targeted neurons in behaving animals. Two approaches in philosophy of neuroscience, mechanism and ruthless reductionism, provide explicit accounts of experiments and results using tools like these, but each offers a different picture about how levels of mechanisms relate. I argue here that the ruthless reductionist's direct mind-to-cellular/molecular activities linkages "in a single bound" better fits with both the experimental designs using these tools and some of the scientists' own judgments about their results than does the mechanist's "nested hierarchies of mechanisms-within-mechanisms." So at least some important work in current neuroscience appears to be ruthlessly reductive. Mechanism may not correctly characterize all current work in neuroscience, despite its recent popularity.

Psychoneural reduction: a perspective from neural circuits

Psychoneural reduction has been debated extensively in the philosophy of neuroscience. In this article I will evaluate metascientific approaches that claim direct molecular and cellular explanations of cognitive functions. I will initially consider the issues involved in linking cellular properties to behaviour from the general perspective of neural circuits. These circuits that integrate the molecular and cellular components underlying cognition and behaviour, making consideration of circuit properties relevant to reductionist debates. I will then apply this general perspective to specific systems where psychoneural reduction has been claimed, namely hippocampal long-term potentiation and the Aplysia gill-withdrawal reflex.

Lessons for experimental philosophy from the rise and “fall” of neurophilosophy

ABSTRACTExperimental philosophy is a recent development whose broader aims and goals are still being debated. Some prominent experimental philosophers have articulated an attitude toward perennial philosophy that is reminiscent of an early explicitly defended goal of neurophilosophy, a field that predated experimental philosophy by at least one decade. But relative to that early goal, neurophilosophy quickly “fell” within broader philosophy, and came to assume its current status, a technical specialty within the philosophy of science (now more commonly referred to as “the philosophy of neuroscience”). In this paper I document the revolutionary goal of early neurophilosophy, provide a novel explanation of its “fall,” and suggest that analogous goals of some experimental philosophers set that field up for a similar “fall.” I document recent published evidence that experimental philosophy is trending in this direction.

Not Just Philosophy of Neuroscience but Philosophy and Neuroscience

Not Just Philosophy of Neuroscience but Philosophy and Neuroscience

Art as Complement of Philosophy

Art and aesthetic experience, as well as the nature of depiction, representations and images, are crucial topics in the ongoing multifaceted debate at the interface between philosophy of perception, aesthetics, philosophy of mind and neuroscience. This issue collects the papers presented at San Raffaele Spring School of Philosophy and International Conference 2017 and investigates the mentioned topics, together with other related ones, by locating them in the more general framework concerning the relation between perception and cognition. In this introductory chapter, we provide some sketches of this multidisciplinary field of inquiry together with an overview of the materials collected in the issue.

Tibor Solymosi and John R. Shook (eds.): Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, and Pragmatism: Brains at Work with the World

Tibor Solymosi and John R. Shook (eds.): Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, and Pragmatism: Brains at Work with the World

Vatted dreams: neurophilosophy and the politics of phenomenal internalism

Despite much social‐scientific work on the neurosciences, little ethnographic and historical attention has been paid to the field of neurophilosophy. Yet anthropologists studying brain research occasionally critique neurophilosophers for reducing the mind to the brain while affirmatively citing philosophers of mind who present the mind as emerging from interactions between brain, body, and environment. This article examines the ostracized camp of so‐called ‘phenomenal internalists’ – neurophilosophers who believe that consciousness can supervene on the brain alone. This ontological commitment is driven by certain existential and political experiences from false awakenings to disenchantment with the counterculture of the 1970s. But it also draws from neuroscientific research on the dreaming brain. The inquiry concludes with a plea to anthropologists to attend to relations of detachment, both social and neural, and to reconsider their own ontological commitment to externalism in the light of dream research.

One mechanism, many models: a distributed theory of mechanistic explanation

There have been recent disagreements in the philosophy of neuroscience regarding which sorts of scientific models provide mechanistic explanations, and which do not (e.g. computational models, dynamical models, topological models). These disagreements often hinge on two commonly adopted, but conflicting, ways of understanding mechanistic explanations: what I call the “representation-as” account, and the “representation-of” account. In this paper, I argue that neither account does justice to neuroscientific practice. In their place, I offer a new alternative that can defuse some of these disagreements. I argue that individual models do not provide mechanistic explanations by themselves (regardless of what type of model they are). Instead, individual models are always used to complement a huge body of background information and pre-existing models about the target system. With this in mind, I argue that mechanistic explanations are distributed across sets of different, and sometimes contradictory, scientific models. Each of these models contributes limited, but essential, information to the same mechanistic explanation, but none can be considered a mechanistic explanation in isolation of the others.

Illusion and reality: Correlative neurophilosophy

Illusion and reality: Correlative neurophilosophy

Interculturality in dialogue with practical neurophilosophy

El proposito de este articulo es poner en dialogo el discurso sobre la interculturalidad con el nuevo enfoque de las neurociencias en una posible neurofilosofia practica. Primero se muestra el significado de la perspectiva de la interculturalidad (a diferencia de multiculturalidad) y se consideran algunos caminos para una posible etica intercultural. Y, en segundo lugar, se reflexiona sobre las posibilidades y limites de la neurofilosofia, y se plantea la cuestion de si las neurociencias pueden alumbrar una neurofilosofia practica que sea capaz de fundamentar las exigencias eticas de la perspectiva de la interculturalidad antes expuesta.

Where is philosophy of medicine headed? A report of the International Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of Medicine (IASPM).

A major part of philosophy of medicine, although not all of it, is a branch of philosophy of science. This part is not only currently emerging. Many important contributions belong to this field, like Boorse’s ‘Health as a theoretical concept’ [1], which is probably the most cited article in the philosophy of medicine. Some contributions, although relevant for philosophy of science, are entrenched in bioethics, medical humanities, and historical and social studies of science. Other contributions come from fields such as philosophy of biology, general philosophy of science, philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of cognitive science, and can rightly be considered pieces of philosophy of medicine. This is so either because they thoroughly scrutinize examples of diseases or because they investigate scientific methods not necessarily specific to, but mostly used in, medical science. Certainly, questions about biological functions, causality, evidence, mechanisms and decision making are not only relevant to the study of medicine, but their specificity to this field makes them important for philosophy of medicine as well. The result is institutional dispersion. Despite the existence of a bunch of periodicals, there is no prominent journal in the philosophy of medicine as a branch of philosophy of science. Academic positions in this field often demand competence in bioethics and although no master’s programme in the world is yet dedicated to this specialty alone, some are emerging. Philosophers in this field, in early career or not, do not have many opportunities to gather for international events: the International Philosophy of Medicine Roundtable organizes the only one specific to the field. Yet philosophers of medicine significantly contribute papers and symposia to events such as the European Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of the Life Science; the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology; the Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science; the Philosophy of Science Association; and the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice meetings. Some sessions in the meetings of the European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Healthcare have been dedicated to philosophy of medicine as a part of philosophy of science. Recently, a significant introduction to philosophy of medicine has been published: the Philosophy of Medicine: Handbook of Philosophy of Science [2]. Apart from dedicated journals such as Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy – which has significantly drifted towards bioethics for some years – some others have contributed special issues dedicated to philosophy of medicine, as the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, and more accept from time to time a paper very relevant for the philosophy of medicine, such as Biology and Philosophy; Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Part C; and History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. To contribute to a consolidation of the field, the International Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of Medicine (IASPM) was created. The IASPM is a biannual event, the first session of which has been held in Paris from 20 June to 22 June 2013. It is sponsored by a consortium of five research centres: the Center for the Humanities and Health at King’s College (London, UK); the Institut fur Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin at Johannes Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany); the European School of Molecular Medicine (Milan, Italy); the IHPST at Pantheon-Sorbonne (Paris, France); and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Pittsburgh (USA). The Paris session gathered 22 advanced students or junior scholars in the philosophy of medicine: 11 were selected from each partner university and 11 others were selected by standard open call for contributions and peer review. Four senior philosophers gave talks and three others coordinated workshop sessions along with three PhD students. Sixty registered participants attended the event. The topic of the conference was ‘Unity and autonomy in the philosophy of medicine’. It was purposely not very specific, so that bs_bs_banner

Philosophy, Neuroscience and Education

This short note takes two quotations from Snooks’ recent editorial on neuroeducation and teases out some further details on the philosophy of neuroscience and neurophilosophy along with consideration of the implications of both for philosophy of education.

Inquiry, vision and objects: Foraging for coherence within neuroscience

Abstract We come prepared to track events and objects, building our knowledge base while foraging for coherence. Classical pragmatism recognizes that the acquisition of knowledge is in part a contact sport (e.g. Peirce, Dewey). One of the aims of neuroscience is to capture human experience. One route to perhaps achieve this may be through the study of the visual system and its expansion in our evolutionary history. Embodied cephalic systems, as Dewey knew well, are tied to self-corrective inquiry. A philosophy of neuroscience needs to capture how such events are tracked, tested through experience, and subsequently modified in the brain to comprise a knowledge base.

Neurophilosophy: My brain and I

Neurophilosophy: My brain and I

The role of supervenience and constitution in neuroscientific research

This paper is concerned with the notions of supervenience and mechanistic constitution as they have been discussed in the philosophy of neuroscience. Since both notions essentially involve specific dependence and determination relations among properties and sets of properties, the question arises whether the notions are systematically connected and how they connect to science. In a first step, some definitions of supervenience and mechanistic constitution are presented and tested for logical independence. Afterwards, certain assumptions fundamental to neuroscientific inquiry are made explicit in order to show that the presented definitions of supervenience are virtually uninteresting for theory construction in this field. In a third step, a new formulation of supervenience is developed that makes explicit reference to the notion of constitution and that bridges the gap between the philosophical concepts and explanatory practice in neuroscience.

Lost in Phenospace. Questioning the Claims of Popular Neurophilosophy

Lost in Phenospace. Questioning the Claims of Popular Neurophilosophy

Reconsidering ‘spatial memory’ and the Morris water maze

The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze throughout the history of its use, we encounter numerous responses to the question of “what” phenomenon it circumscribes ranging from cognitive functions (e.g., “spatial learning”, “spatial navigation”), to representational changes (e.g., “cognitive map formation”) to terms that appear to refer exclusively to observable changes in behavior (e.g., “water maze performance”). To date philosophical analyses of the water maze have not been directed at sorting out what phenomenon the device delineates nor the sources of the different answers to the question of what. I undertake both of these tasks in this paper. I begin with an analysis of Morris’s first published research study using the water maze and demonstrate that he emerged from it with an experimental learning paradigm that at best circumscribed a discrete set of observable changes in behavior. However, it delineated neither a discrete set of representational changes nor a discrete cognitive function. I cite this in combination with a reductionist-oriented research agenda in cellular and molecular neurobiology dating back to the 1980s as two sources of the lack of consistency across the history of the experimental and review literature as to what is under study in the water maze.