Online research in philosophy

Under the umbrella of the burgeoning neurotransdisciplines, scholars are using the principles and research methodologies of their primary and secondary fields to examine developments in neuroimaging, neuromodulation and psychopharmacology. The path for advanced scholarship at the intersection of law and neuroscience may clear if work across the disciplines is collected and reviewed and outstanding and debated issues are identified and clarified. In this article, I organize, examine and refine a narrow class of the burgeoning neurotransdiscipline scholarship; that is, scholarship at the interface of law and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Functional neuroimaging (NI) technologies like Positron Emission Tomography and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) have revolutionized neuroscience, and provide crucial tools to link cognitive psychology and traditional neuroscientific models. A growing discipline of 'neurophilosophy' brings fMRI evidence to bear on traditional philosophical issues such as weakness of will, moral psychology, rational choice, social interaction, free will, and consciousness. NI has also attracted critical attention from psychologists and from philosophers of science. I review debates over the evidential status of fMRI, including the differences between brain scans and ordinary images, the legitimacy of forward inference and reverse inference, and deductive versus probabilistic accounts of NI evidence. I conclude with a discussion of fMRI as exploratory rather than confirmatory evidence, linking this debate to the growing literature on cognitive ontology.

Cognitive neuroscientists use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure properties of a participant’s brain during a cognitive task. These imaging results are transformed into compelling pictures of brain activity using statistical models. I will argue that, for a broad class of experiments, neuroimaging experts have a tendency to over‐interpret the functional significance of their data. This over‐interpretation appears to follow from contentious theoretical assumptions about the mind‐brain connection, and from a propensity to conflate the anatomical location of a statistically‐significant correlation with knowledge of the mechanistic functioning at that location.

In this paper, I argue that companies who use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans for lie detection encounter the same basic ethical stumbling blocks as commercial companies that market traditional polygraphs. Markets in traditional voluntary polygraphs are common and fail to elicit much uproar among ethicists. Thus, for consistency, if markets in polygraphs are ethically unproblematic, markets using fMRIs for lie detection are equally as acceptable. Furthermore, while I acknowledge two substantial differences between the ethical concerns involving polygraphs and fMRI lie detection, I argue that these concerns can be overcome and do not lead to the conclusion that markets in fMRI lie detection are ethically dubious. It is my conclusion that voluntary markets in fMRI lie detection can be justified by consumer autonomy and should be allowed to persist.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI)1 is widely used to support hypotheses about brain function. Many find the images produced from fMRI data to be especially compelling evidence for scientific hypotheses [McCabe and Castel, 2008]. There are many problems with all of this; I want to start with two of them, and argue that they get us closer to an under-appreciated worry about many imaging experiments.