Abstract
Neuroscience offers more than new empirical evidence about the details of cognitive functions such as language, perception
and action. Since it also shows many functions to be highly distributed, interconnected and dependent on mechanisms
at different levels of processing, it challenges concepts that are traditionally used to describe these functions. The
question is how to accommodate these concepts to the recent evidence. A recent proposal, made in Philosophical Foundations
of Neuroscience (2003) by Bennett and Hacker, is that concepts play a foundational role in neuroscience, that empirical
research needs to presuppose them and that changing concepts is a philosophical task. In defending this perspective,
PFN shows much neuroscientific writing to be dualistic in nature due to our poor grasp of its foundations. In our review
article we take a different approach. Instead of foundationalism we plead for a mild coherentism, which allows for a gradual
and continuous alteration of concepts in light of new evidence. Following this approach it is also easier to deal with
some neurological conditions (like blindsight, synaesthesia) that pose difficulties for our concepts. Finally, although words
and concepts seem to seduce us to thinking that many skills and tasks function separately, it is language skill that – as
neuroscientific evidence shows – co-emerges with action/perception cycles and thus seems to require revision of some of
our central concepts.