Smug, Gnomic, and Enclosed: A Neuroscientist, a Philosopher, and a Sociologist walk into a Bar...
On a missed opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue.
Recording of ‘The Ethics of the Cognitive Sciences: What can the brain tell us about the mind?’, a panel discussion hosted at the LSE, moderated by Tali Sharot (neuroscientist) and featuring Raymond Dolan (neuroscientist), Peter Hacker (philosopher), and Nikolas Rose (sociologist) [link].
As any unfortunate looking to unlock research grant money will tell you, ‘interdisciplinarity’ currently enjoys a totemic status in the social sciences and humanities. Past are the days when a simple ethnography, survey, or textual analysis kept your larder stuffed and hearth aglow; nowadays you must embrace ‘mixed methods’ and clearly state your intention to reach promiscuously across disciplinary divides on pain of going hungry and cold…
Now, while I ironise, I do in fact buy into the drive for greater interdisciplinarity, especially in domains currently monopolised by one (or a small number thereof) natural sciences. And, as it happens, I recently encountered the recording of panel discussion hosted at the LSE in 2014 that concerns such a domain (the mind/brain) and does a stellar job of illustrating (i) why interdisciplinary dialogue is, in principle, very important and (ii) why it so often fails in practice. The panel, vaguely entitled ‘The Ethics of the Cognitive Sciences: What can the brain tell us about the mind?’, is an attempt to establish a dialogue between three men, each representing a discipline with distinctive contributions to make to the study of brain and mind: Raymond Dolan, a neuroscientist; Peter Hacker, a philosopher of neuroscience and Wittgenstein exegete; and Nikolas Rose, a sociologist of the life and mind sciences.
On these terms, as you can hear in the recording above, the event is a colourful failure, with its distinguished participants (Dolan and Rose in particular) resorting to bitchy little jibes by the end. It is nonetheless an entertaining and instructive listen, in particular for what it tells/shows us about (i) and (ii).
§ Why interdisciplinary dialogue matters.
It would help to start by getting clear on what each of these disciplines—science, philosophy of science, and social science/science and technology studies—can tell us about the brain, the mind, and the study thereof. Luckily, Dolan, Hacker, and Rose do a good job of illustrating this for us.
Science
Very, very broadly construed, a science aims to generate knowledge about a particular domain of the world through a process of structured inquiry. Accordingly, in his account of mind’s relationship to the brain. Dolan provides us with an account of neuroscience’s domain and process of inquiry:
“…as respiration is a key function of the lungs ,and digestion is a key function of our elementary tract, then you can equally describe the mind as a key function or property of the brain. Put simply, brain is the organ of mind. There's no mind stuff that is independent of brain activity. [And] like everything else in the biological world, our brains and its products, our minds, have been shaped by evolutionary selective pressures. The nature of these pressures have changed over time.”
The mind, Dolan says, isn’t an entity separate to the brain but a collection of brain-functions, some of which we have phenomenal access to. As such, the domain of neuroscientific knowledge contains both brain and mind for, in inquiring into the former, neuroscientists are, in effect, often studying aspects of the latter. And based on his presentation (and the few scraps of my undergraduate philosophy of mind courses that I recall), neuroscientific inquiry usually involves investigating the brain’s structures and activities and generating hypotheses and explanations couched in material/evolutionary terms. His explanation of the amygdala is exemplary here:
“…the engine of evolution as expressed in our physical makeup has a habit of leaving residues. An extreme example here is an appendage called the appendix in our alimentary tract, for which there is no obvious function. This is also likely to be the case for our brain. We still retain an ancient alarm system centred on a part of the brain called the amygdala that we know has remained in place largely unchanged over half-a-billion years. The crocodile provides a living fossil of this unchanging architecture.”
Neuroscience links an aspect of mind (panic or alarm) with a part of the brain (the amygdala) whose presence is uncovered through investigations of the brain’s structure (in both human beings and crocodilians, it turns out) and function is explained in evolutionary terms.
Philosophy of Science
To do its work, science—like any cognitive, sensemaking activity—deploys conceptual schemes. Peter Hacker explains:
“By conceptual scheme, I understand a network of interrelated general concepts and concept-types the language-using community deploys in thought and talk in some domain of experience [such as neuroscience]. The web of [neuroscientific] concepts and concept-types constitutes a [neuroscientific] conceptual scheme. It is at work in our daily discourse and indeed it is partly constitutive of our nature as rational creatures and human beings. A conceptual scheme […] is neither true nor false, only more or less useful.”
Neuroscience’s conceptual scheme includes concepts ‘brain’, ‘neurone’, ‘synapse’, ‘amygdala’, ‘hippocampus’, and ‘mind’, variously deployed by neuroscientists to generate knowledge within their domain.
However, much as being a cyclist doesn’t require grasping the laws of physics that hold the bike upright, being able to use scientific (neuro- or otherwise) concepts does not require being able to set out the scheme within which they lie or the logical connections that hold between them. This, according to Hacker, is the philosopher of science’s role.1 Deploying the tools of logical, conceptual, and linguistic analysis, philosophers of science draw out, clarify, and analyse the conceptual schemata underlying scientists’ knowledge generation within a particular domain. The end goal of philosophical analysis, then, is not to adjudicate on scientific claims’ veracity but to establish whether or not they make sense. Philosophers of science are, goes a famous adage of Mary Midgley’s, conceptual plumbers.2
Hacker stages a rebarbative demonstration of this in his retorts to Dolan’s claims about mind’s relationship to the brain. By considering what ‘brain’ and ‘mind’ mean and how they are used, he points out that the mind cannot be the brain because “the brain weighs three pounds and is seven inches high, but the mind [as that term is used/meant] has neither weight nor height.” Similarly, he continues, more directly addressing Dolan, the mind cannot be what the brain does because “the mind does not metabolise oxygen or transmit neural impulses to the muscles of the body.” On Hacker’s terms, Dolan’s claims are not merely wrong (i.e., they aren’t just false statements about the world); they are nonsensical. In attributing brain-properties to mind, neuroscientists commit a category error and may as well be speaking of an ice-cold idea or ear-splitting colours.3
Such nonsense can have truly pernicious practical consequences. If you equate mind and personhood with the brain, you risk legitimising all sorts of stupid interventions, such as approaches to mental illness that focus on fixing a brain’s ‘chemical imbalances’ without considering the person enveloping it’s social/familial environment. Other examples include epidemiologists’ understanding of ‘causation’ or computer scientists’ understanding of ‘intelligence’. As long as scientists fail to get clear on what either of these mean, we will continue to be subjected to interventions or policies based on concepts and claims that aren’t even wrong (“artificial intelligence” anyone?).4
Conveniently enough, this question of intervention sort of brings us onto our third and final category:
Science and Technology Studies (STS)
Now things can get a little more interesting... An STSer’s activities can sorted according to their object of study into two broad categories: studies within a scientific framework and studies of a scientific framework’s structure, emergence, and social interactions.
The former refers to the STSer’s activities that apply sociological (or otherwise socio-scientic) methods and knowledge to objects embedded in a scientific framework and that, in doing so, can supplement, transform, and even challenge natural science’s claims about the world. Nikolas Rose gives a nice account of how in his polite-but-pointed critique of neuroimaging. Using techniques like fMRI, neuroscientists produce images of blood oxygenation levels across different parts of the brain which can be used to study how brain-activity changes depending on what task a person is doing. This, neuroscientists claim, allows them to draw conclusions about what parts of the brain are involved in particular activities (“the localisation thesis”) and about the nature of those activities. Hence you get reports like the following, claiming that mathematics is beautiful, and can be appreciated as beautiful, in much the same way that great art and music are beautiful and can be appreciated as such because of what a series of fMRI scans show.
Rose, for his part, is unconvinced by all this. Without dismissing neuroimages as wholly uninformative, he draws on social science’s ample resources and findings to point to the limitations of the neuroscientific interpretation of them. He says:
“You place an individual in a scanner in a room where they're instructed by a scientist to carry out certain tasks. And yet all you observe in your image is what's happening in the brain. You rather ignore the fact that brains are in skulls, that skulls are in bodies, that the brain in the normal course of events receives information from throughout the body, and indeed that brain and body are fundamentally implicated in a set of social relationships. To separate out from that simply what's happening in changes in patterns of blood oxygenation in the brain seems to me to ignore certain rather important things that we've learned in the social sciences, and indeed in the cognitive sciences over the last 150 years.”
In other words, much of the last century-and-a-half’s worth of socio-scientific work has emphasised just how dependent human qualities, experiences, thoughts, and activities are on their social contexts, and focussing on changes in blood oxygenation levels alone cannot do justice to this wealth of knowledge. When properly accounted for, STS can contribute to a natural science’s investigations, including by forcing its practitioners like neuroscientists to modify their assumptions and interpretations of their data. Its scope for doing so, however, may vary from natural science to natural science: while it is easy to see why STS may have something to contribute to neuroscience, psychiatry, and medicine, it is less clear what it could add to particle physics or to the study of gravitational waves.5
In my estimation, however, this is only a small proportion of what STSers do; far more significant are their studies of scientific frameworks’ structure, emergence, and social interactions. The concepts and concept-types making up scientific frameworks are not ‘given’ to scientists, either in the sense of being wholly explicit and self-evident or being unmoored from historical contingency. On the contrary, as I noted above, scientists may not be wholly aware of the proto-concepts, concepts, and concept-types shaping their everyday practice and these concepts, like all human ideas, have a history that is deeply embedded in—even inseparable from—other social, political, economic, geographical, and otherwise contingent historical processes.
Accordingly, much of an STSers’ work involves closely attending to how scientists talk or run their experiments and construct their theories and trying to draw out the conceptual frameworks underpinning these practices (i.e., doing ethnography of science), as well as describing how these frameworks emerged and how they have evolved over time (i.e., doing history and sociology of science). If STS’ studies within frameworks contribute to our natural scientific understanding of the world, its studies of frameworks provide philosophy of science with much of its raw material for conceptual analysis.6
In turn, much of this historical and sociological work involves tracing out how scientific concepts and concept-types have interacted, and continue to interact, with other frameworks and forces circulating in society. Rose’s work on how scientific concepts have shaped our reflexive identities—what Michel Foucault calls processes of ‘subjectification’—provides with yet another nice example here:
“…my work over a long time has focused on one particular question, which I suppose you might think of as a question of identity, although I pose it really slightly differently. So my question is, who do we think we are, us human beings, how we come to think about ourselves in that way, and with what consequences? Now, I've had a particular focus in trying to address that question of who we think we are, especially since the middle of the 19th century, on what one might call the positive sciences of the human being, the ‘psy’-sciences, and now the ‘neuro’-sciences, their languages, their explanations, their visions, and their forms of expertise.”7
Other similar work might involve, oh I don’t know, looking at how scientific frameworks, ideas, and techniques shape policymaking processes within modern government and its interventions…
Below is a summary of what has been said thus far. The only element in need of an explanation is the ‘clarifies’ arrow linking philosophy of science to STS, and that can be quickly dispatched of: STS, like natural science, generates knowledge about the world from within conceptual frameworks and, like natural science’s, these frameworks can and should be subjected to philosophical analysis.
In light of this, we can say that interdisciplinarity matters for at least two reasons, one scholastic and the other policy related. As we have observed, philosophy of science and STS have much to contribute to natural science’s process of inquiry and understanding of its domain, respectively. On these terms, interdisciplinarity stands to improve science and enrich scientific knowledge: Dolan, if he ever deigns to listen, might find that he has something to learn from his co-panellists.
Interdisciplinarity is also essential to good and humane science-based policymaking. As we have seen, STS contributes to our scientific knowledge of a particular domain and to our understanding of how scientific concepts and techniques interact with other aspects of social reality. Both of these are relevant to policymaking. Gently reminding scientists and policymakers of the limits of what fMRIs actually tell us about mental states may avoid deleterious reductionism in mental health policy, just as tentatively tracing out the social implications of a particular scientific concept or technique’s policy deployment may give policymakers a better, more expansive grasps of their proposed intervention’s impact. For example, an STSer might tell policymakers that while ‘risk’ is a useful concept for biostatisticians looking for trends in reams population data, encouraging individuals to think of themselves as essentially ‘at risk’ of certain illnesses or conditions may not be conducive to their (the individuals’) flourishing.8
The philosophy of science’s relevance to policymaking is trickier to delineate, especially in the context of an emergency. I can appreciate that, in the face of a crisis, it may not be conducive to efficient or smooth policymaking to have an Oxford don sucking on a hawkbill pipe and telling you that you are committing a category error or that you are rashly taking a necessary condition for a sufficient condition. Nonetheless, such expertise and analysis is relevant—indeed, essential—to good, clear thinking about systems and entities whose management has serious implications for people’s lives and well-being. Clarifying what we mean by ‘cause’, ‘disability’, ‘sickness’, ‘labour’, ‘well-being’, ‘wealth’, ‘opportunity’, ‘liberty’, ‘dignity’, etc. is crucial to designing and implementing policy within modern welfare states. We must think about how to better incorporate philosophers’ only apparently highfalutin skills and concerns into our policymaking processes, networks, and institutions.
§ Why interdisciplinary dialogue fails.
If interdisciplinary dialogue is so good, why does it so often fail? Sticking with my novel-of-ideas reading of the LSE’s event, treating each of our panellists—Dolan, Hacker, and Rose—as stand-ins for particular disciplines and attitudes, I will briefly explore three possible reasons for its failure here: chauvinism, gnomisms, and enclosure. I do not, of course, take this list to be anything like exhaustive.
Chauvinism
Almost definitionally, expertise implies social hierarchy. Experts know more about and/or have more skills in a particular domain than non-experts and are accorded a particular standing and authority on that basis. This is frequently desirable, of course—you don’t want the Department for Transport consulting flat earthers to set aviation policy—but it can also be accompanied by a sort of disciplinary chauvinism, which is erroneously assuming that your discipline and your discipline alone has the final say in response to a given problem or question. This tendency is especially acute amongst natural and/or quantitative scientists, given the (often spurious) totemic power that numbers enjoy.9
This attitude is on painful display in Dolan’s equal parts garbled and scoffing response to an audience member’s question about the possibility of future interdisciplinary work:
Audience member: “Can you see any time in the future where you can work together and find a language which we can all go forward and better understand the mind, using both what has been found by fMRI machines […] and what has been found with psychology?”
Dolan: “Well, I think philosophy has a very important role and I think one of the roles it has is making clear the assumptions in our erm, that we deploy the right sort of semantics, sort of frame of reference for a problem [sic.]. I'd be very happy to work with a philosopher that I could really have an extended conversation with and that I could understand. And I'd be more than happy if there was a consensus that this would help neuroscience in my next grant application to also apply for a position of a philosopher [sic.]. And when I go before the panel, they’ll say: ‘Well, can you justify it? We can understand everything else here, but that philosopher, what’s that going to do?’ Well then, you know, if the [response] would be something like ‘it would be a lot of fun, you’re going to have to drink lots of cups of coffee’… [chortles]… But you know, so I’m saying that, yes philosophy has an important role [but] I think philosophy hasn't done itself a great service because a lot of it seems to catch itself in semantics and a type of obfuscation.” [I promise that I’m not being snide with this transcription! If you listen to the thing, you’ll hear that he’s hard to follow at times.]
Here, Dolan both acknowledges (“that I could understand”) and displays (simultaneously celebrating and reproaching philosophy for focussing on semantic problems) that he doesn’t understand what philosophy does, ultimately dismissing it as ‘a lot of fun’ that could not possibly warrant funding as a part of a neuroscience project. He seems to take it for granted that the sort of work that he and his colleagues undertake is, ultimately, the only one worth investing in when trying to understand the mind and brain. However, as we saw above, this is an untenable position and makes true interdisciplinary dialogue between (neuro)scientists, philosophers, and STSers impossible.
Gnomisms
Unfortunately, where Dolan is haughty, Hacker is gnomic and does not make much of an effort to meet the neuroscientists where they are. He evinces that all-too-common trait amongst philosophers of taking others’ failure to grasp their analyses’ content and relevance as proof of shallowness rather than of differing disciplinary traditions and, in this case, the absence of a background in Wittgenstein’s subtle therapeutic approach to philosophy. Philosophers tend to forget how unusual their discipline is in dedicating so much time to meta- and methodological reflection, and so often fail in communicating their work’s relevance to scientists interested in more practical matters. Ultimately, it in not non-philosophers’ fault that philosophy seems marginal: different disciplines have evolved to have different concerns and, my snark notwithstanding, Dolan isn’t wrong to accuse philosophers of writing impenetrably.
Philosophers need to swallow their pride and plead the case for their discipline’s urgent relevance, including by building common frameworks and vocabularies with scientists and STSers that makes this relevance self-evident. It may also require lobbying universities to make some sort of philosophy and/or logic 101 course mandatory to all non-philosophy students. Interdisciplinary dialogue depends on them doing so.
Enclosure
And finally, where Hacker is obscure, Rose proves to be insufficiently critical. His response to Dolan’s aspersions is seemingly to agree and to accuse philosophers like Hacker of operating “as a kind of thought police on the sciences”. This is a strange line of attack given that it is surely in the sciences’ interest to avoid talking nonsense, and possibly reflects Rose’s tacit embrace of scientific chauvinism’s premise—namely, that the final word on all things mind and brain belongs to neuroscience and that, consequently, it should not have to subject itself to philosophy’s meddling analyses. Unfortunately, the widespread acceptance of scientific chauvinism can result in what none other that Nikolas Rose himself describes as an ‘enclosure’:
“'[Enclosures are] relatively bounded locales or types of judgment within which their power and authority is concentrated, intensified and defended. Enclosures may be generated in governmental networks through the use of esoteric knowledge, technical skill, or established position as crucial resources which others cannot easily countermand or appropriate.”10
Enclosures are spaces within which a single discipline’s (or limited set thereof) conceptual framework, techniques, and concerns set the terms of debate. Enclosure doesn’t mean that other disciplines can’t feature in these debates but that acceptance of the enclosing discipline’s concepts, priorities, and authority is the price of entry to serious conversation. Again, for reasons that we saw above, this threatens interdisciplinarity as the latter requires that both philosophy and STS be able to challenge science’s most fundamental conceptual and empirical claims. There can be no one discipline to rule them all if proper interdisciplinary dialogue is to flourish.
We should of course be wary of making too much of Rose’s thinly-veiled criticisms of Hacker as, given his willingness to critique neuroimaging from a sociological vantage point, he clearly isn’t wholly sold on the neuroscientific enclosure. It would, however, be good if he and those like him could extend a similar privilege to philosophers of science, whose work promises to help us clarify and better navigate the 21st century’s ever-expanding domain of scientific and technological knowledge.
§ For more stuff on (scientific) interdisciplinarity, please see:
Anticipating a pair of complaints that I can already hear brewing in certain, less-then-disinterested readers’ minds, yes, this is a very limited account of what philosophers of science do and yes, all good scientists and STSers will undertake some conceptual-analytic work. But this is not a meaningful challenge as I am not—per one of Hacker’s many witticisms–adjudicating on the terms a trade union dispute. I am naming activities, not allocating them and it is important that each profession concerned, scientist, philosopher, or sociologist of science, understands and is open to engaging with the others’ work. Accordingly, it is equally important that our academic institutions and networks be better organised to make this sort of interfacing and boundary-crossing spontaneous and easy. My manifesto offer would be that we want our universities to produce disciplinary omnivores like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Henri Bergson, Ian Hacking, and Amartya Sen, rather high-IQ morons trained to think, speak, and graze in a single pasture.
Midgley, Mary (1992). Philosophical Plumbing. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 33:139-151:
“Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole.”
Psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff (of SSRI-scepticism notoriety) offers a tidy account of Hacker’s approach in her review of Vol 1. of his magnum opus: Moncrieff, J. (2019, May 8). ‘The uniqueness of life: a review of Peter Hacker’s “Human Nature: the Categorial Framework” and its implications for the mind-body problem and our understanding of mental disorder.’ https://joannamoncrieff.com/2019/05/08/the-uniqueness-of-life-a-review-of-peter-hackers-human-nature-the-categorial-framework-and-its-implications-for-the-mind-body-problem-and-our-understanding-of-mental-disorder/.
There, Moncrieff explains Hacker’s position thus,
“…the ‘mind’ is not something inside us. Indeed, it is important to appreciate that it is not a ‘thing’ at all. It is the various capacities the human organism possesses to respond in a particularly sophisticated way to the world around it. These capacities are not separable from the human organism as a whole, including its physical body. The mind-body problem is, to use Hacker’s example, like trying to relate the colour of a five pound note to its value: ‘A £5 note is green and has a value of £5 but the colour green does not stand in any relationship to the value of £5’.”
For more on epidemiologists’ understanding of causation see Broadbent, Alex (2013). Philosophy of Epidemiology. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Both of which, for what it’s worth, have been the subject of well-respected studies within STS: Andrew Pickering’s Constructing Quarks and Harry Collins’ Gravity’s Kiss. (I’ve read neither 🫤)
For the complaint that philosophers of science already do much of what I have described as STS, I’ll refer you to endnote 1.
For his book-length treatment of this, see Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (co-authored with Joelle M. Abi-Rached), blurbed as exploring “the ways neurobiological conceptions of personhood are influencing everything from child rearing to criminal justice, and are transforming the ways we ‘know ourselves’ as human beings.” (I haven’t read this either 🤪)
BMJ. (2019, June 24). Caitjan Gainty and Grazia De Michele: The disease of “at risk.” The BMJ. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2019/06/24/caitjan-gainty-and-grazia-de-michelle-the-disease-of-at-risk/.
p.19, Craig, C. (2018). How Does Government Listen to Scientists? (1st ed. 2019 edition.). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Seems the three people you've named could do with a huge dose of humility.