Abstract

In this paper, I intend to justify a positive approach to social neuroscience that takes into consideration restrictive philosophical arguments about our—common and scientific—use of mental concepts. I will start with a clarification of the philosophical point of view, which holds that it is impossible to identify others’ mental states as neural states because the language we use to speak about others’ mental states—and our own, too—is a public language. Second, I will show the gap between explanations of social linguistic communication of intentions and reasons for acting and neurological explanations of the human mind. Third, I will use M. D. Lieberman’s Internal/External Reference dichotomy to question whether recent findings in the social neurosciences confirm that many folk psychological concepts refer to external social events rather than internal states. If this is the case, neuroscientific findings show that part of the psychological language use is fundamentally behavioristic, i.e., not about neural states, but about social actions. These actions obviously include bodily and neurological processes, but they are not defined by these. Therefore, if all this is true, neuroscientists are right to be confident that neuroscience can help us to investigate social interactions, but certainly not in a reductive manner¾that is, not by reducing socially used concepts, such as the concept of “intending” to do something, to neural activities; instead, neuroscience can help to establish new and more precise classifications of social behaviors, that have, among their parts, scientifically identifiable flexible neural processes.