Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, and Pragmatism: Brains at Work with the World ed. by Tibor Solymosi & John R. Shook (review)
- Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, and Pragmatism: Brains at Work with the World ed. by Tibor Solymosi & John R. Shook
The general aim of this very welcome volume is to explore the relation between pragmatism and neuroscience. The thirteen chapters are evenly divided into four parts, roughly organized around the themes of brain and pragmatism (4 articles), emotion and cognition, creativity and education, and ethics (3 articles each).
The beginning chapter written by the editors attempts to show that advances in behavioral and brain sciences intersect core theses of pragmatism with regards to cognition and the mind-world relation. The basic assumption is that neuroscience and pragmatism share a (methodological) naturalist program: pragmatism refers all philosophical explanation to experimental science and neuroscience explains all mental life by neurobiological processes that can be discovered through experimental techniques. According to this naturalist program, opposing dichotomies such as those of the Cartesian dualism, there is no mind behind or above those experienced processes. The book as a whole forcefully demonstrates how pragmatism, as a philosophical tradition, has been vindicated by recent programmes in the philosophy of mind—such as those taking cognition to be embodied, enactive and embedded—and these, in turn, by neuroscientific discoveries. [End Page 389]
A second aim of the editors and some of the contributors is to argue for the establishment of a new strand of neurophilosophy, neuropragmatism—a very recent term coined by Solymosi—defined as a ‘scientifically informed treatment of cognition, knowledge, the body-mind relation, agency, socialization, and further issues predicated on sound judgments about these basic matters’ (chapter l, p. 3). The project of the editors is precisely to build on new data to show the far-reaching implications of original insights of pragmatist philosophy. Although this enterprise is not without merits, the editors occasionally take their advocacy of pragmatism a bit too far, suggesting that science has finally managed to produce evidence for pragmatic intuitions on these topics. (For the editors’ full statement of purpose, see their previous ‘Neuropragmatism: A Neurophilosophical Manifesto’, on which the first chapter is partially built.)1 Many of the volume’s contributions show that the influence pragmatism exerted on contemporary neuroscience should not be underestimated—think of James’ thesis of brain plasticity or Dewey’s fruitful transactional conception of experience. But to claim that the brain is modified in interaction with the environment is not yet to show how these modifications occur and what neural mechanisms underlie learning. As anyone dealing with historical research is aware, it is the way the relation between contemporary discoveries and historical antecedents is qualified that is really informative.
For this reason, scholars have commonly drawn a distinction between scientific inquiries and philosophical ones, however close—as in the case of pragmatism—their relation is portrayed as being. (See the chapter by W. Teed Rockwell on this, for instance pp. 58–60.) And accordingly, our main concerns are about the negative claim made in the book—that neuropragmatism takes precedence to other strands within neurophilosophy—not with the positive one according to which the history of pragmatism has played an important role in the definition of key problems that have fed into the evolution of neuroscience. The chapters arguing for the negative claim are founded upon the insights of early pragmatists and contributions by other neurophilosophers, but do not make a compelling case for an original contribution from the direction of neuropragmatism. To say that ‘scholars bold enough to draw conclusions about the nature of the mind, the dynamic nature of human knowledge, and the practical criteria for judging epistemic success unite the cognitive strands of neuropragmatism’ (chapter 1, p. 4) seems to fall too short even as a provisory aggregating factor. What needs to be provided is a differentiating account of each of these aspects for neuropragmatism to make its claim as an independent and alternative strand of neurophilosophy.
Take, for example, the case of extended cognition and Dewey’s notion of the external world as ‘internal’ to the functions of the organism (still Shook...
