Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy and Pragmatism

Brains at Work with the World

T. Solymosi, J. Shook, T. Solymosi, J. Shook, T. Solymosi, J. Shook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137376077
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Bringing together active neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and scholars this volume considers the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the implications of neuroscience for education and ethics.

Part I

Pragmatism, Philosophy, and the Brain

1

Neuropragmatism and the Reconstruction of Scientific and Humanistic Worldviews¹

John R. Shook and Tibor Solymosi

The question of the integration of mind-body in action is the most practical of all questions we can ask of our civilization. It is not just a speculative question; it is a demand: a demand that the labor of multitudes now too predominantly physical in character be inspirited by purpose and emotion and informed by knowledge and understanding. It is a demand that what now pass for highly intellectual and spiritual functions shall be integrated with the ultimate conditions and means of all achievement, namely the physical, and thereby accomplish something beyond themselves. Until this integration is effected in the only place where it can be carried out, in action itself, we shall continue to live in a society in which a soulless and heartless materialism is compensated for by soulful but futile and unnatural idealism and spiritualism.

John Dewey²

Neurophilosophical pragmatism, or neuropragmatism, is a scientifically informed treatment of cognition, knowledge, the body-mind relation, agency, socialization, and further issues predicated on sound judgments about these basic matters. Neuropragmatism is capable of grappling with philosophical questions arising at many levels, from synapse to society. There is much at stake, as the epigraph by Dewey states. With its firm grounding in science, neuropragmatism may be the philosophy best equipped to deal productively with the challenges facing our culture, as developments in neuroscience and neurotechnology bring about both better means for dealing with old problems, and new ways of creating and dealing with the problems of today and tomorrow.

The amazing progress of the behavioral and brain sciences has confirmed many of pragmatism’s core claims, culminating in a resurgence of neopragmatism, and then its fresh flowering in neuropragmatism. The recovery of the concept of dynamic embodied and embedded cognition, and the renewed appreciation for the brain’s systems as evolved functions, have together carried many researchers toward the tenets of neuropragmatism. Scholars bold enough to draw conclusions about the nature of mind, the dynamic nature of human knowledge, and the practical criteria for judging epistemic success unite the cognitive strands of neuropragmatism. Searching for such a comprehensive reunion of science and philosophy should not be disdained. In the words of the editors of a recent book on embodied cognitive science,

We need to put together conceptual analyses of the notions of representation, computation, emergence, embodiment, and the like, with empirical work that allows us to bring together ecological, dynamic, interactive, situated, and embodied approaches to the scientific study of cognition.³

Neuropragmatism offers a philosophical intersection for coordinating this pluralistic effort. The prefix ‘neuro’ portends no reductionist agenda. Quite the opposite: the anti-reductionist, pluralistic, and interdisciplinary tradition of pragmatism remains securely at the heart of neuropragmatism. All the same, a philosophical position on cognition and mind must cohere with the best neuroscience available.

We begin with a brief history of pragmatism and the sciences of life and mind. From this history, we update pragmatism in this neurophilosophical form by introducing twelve theses of neuropragmatism. These theses emphasize the connections between pragmatism and the sciences of life and mind, and experimentally propose research programs for engaging scientific researchers as well as for navigating the consequences of research for the larger public.

Classical pragmatism and neuropragmatism

Pragmatism has from its origins formulated philosophical theories about culture, intelligence, and knowledge in ways that respect biology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Classical pragmatism was the original American cognitive science and neurophilosophy. Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Mead were all experimental psychologists who tried to reform philosophy in light of evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and brain science. Indeed, most of the early American psychologists and sociologists had strong pragmatist leanings. Essentially, pragmatism is vitally interested in entirely naturalistic accounts of intelligence and agency, so that all other fields of philosophy – from epistemology to ethics – can be reformed in turn. By integrating science and philosophy, pragmatism attempts to prevent both scientism and speculation from inflating debilitating dualisms.

Pragmatism has always viewed itself as essential to a complete and consistent naturalistic worldview. Any naturalism has to explain how rationality, intelligence, and science are possible within the natural world. Pragmatism has serious opponents not interested in advancing naturalism. At the turn of the 20th century, major philosophical options were few: common sense empiricisms, neo-Kantian rationalisms, phenomenologies, and neo-Hegelian idealisms. Common sense empiricism sought pure sensory impressions or sense data ideas that carry information about nature untainted by any thought, so that cognition simply combines and rearranges that original information into knowledge systems. Neo-Kantian rationalisms, noticing empiricism’s deep problems, postulated non-empirical rational principles to account for scientific knowledge. However, such rationalism fed into anti-naturalism and dualism, as did the phenomenologies that prioritized qualitative experience over nature or biology. Reconciling empiricism and rationalism by adding historicism, neo-Hegelian cultural psychologies stumbled onto the way that knowledge gradually grows from the interfusion of evidence and reasoning in social contexts. John Dewey and George Mead further naturalized this cultural historicism by incorporating Darwinian evolution and experimental psychology.⁴ They proposed a pragmatic naturalism in opposition to naïve empiricism, static representationalism, reductive materialism, methodological individualism, and animal behaviorism. To accomplish this pragmatic naturalism, pragmatists explored more metaphysical issues such as radical empiricism and direct perception, teleological accounts of living systems, non-reductive emergent naturalisms, and perspectival and process ontologies. Not surprisingly, neurophilosophers, and especially neuropragmatists, have been gradually re-engaging these wider issues.

Pragmatism went into eclipse in philosophy departments by the 1930s, due to the ascendency of analytic and linguistic philosophy, along with imports from European positivism. Yet pragmatic ideas continued to flourish in the social sciences from psychology and linguistics to sociology and anthropology. The neopragmatism of the 1970s and 80s, especially in the hands of Richard Rorty, was well known for its linguistic and epistemic conventionalism, but not for its congruence with the latest brain science. Hilary Putnam’s meaning externalism and pragmatic realism⁵ also helped to make actual human cognition relevant to philosophical debates. Some philosophers, inspired by W. V. Quine’s kind of naturalism (which sustained the Deweyan point that cognitions and knowings must be natural events amenable to scientific study), demanded continuities between science and philosophy and pulled analytic philosophy back from pure rationalism.⁶ As the new cognitive and brain sciences emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, they had grown many of the seeds of pragmatism, and when analytic philosophy began to take the brain seriously once again, it encountered these pragmatic ideas. Rationalist analytic philosophers, strong AI proponents, and excessively cognitivist researchers rebelled against such pragmatism; for example, Jerry Fodor has called pragmatism ‘the defining catastrophe of analytic philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.’⁷ However, some analytic philosophers have been returning to parts of pragmatism in various ways, driven by respect for science and its discoveries.

Scholars such as Mark Johnson and the late Francisco Varela recognized in the 1990s that pragmatism was receiving much reconfirmation in the brain sciences. A younger generation, such as Anthony Chemero, W. Teed Rockwell, and Tibor Solymosi – fluent in both classical pragmatism and the latest neuroscience – was in the best position to take stock of matters. Solymosi recently coined the term ‘neuropragmatism.’⁸ From its grounding in the current behavioral and brain sciences, neuropragmatism confirms many core views of traditional pragmatism. Neuropragmatism continues to reform philosophical views about such things as the mind-body relation, the function of intelligence, the nature of knowledge and truth, the nature of voluntary agency and responsibility, the function of social morality, and the ethical ways for dealing with new technologies. Along the way, it distinguishes itself from other neuroscience-based philosophical outlooks.

Twelve theses of neuropragmatism

This section offers 12 theses of an ambitious neuropragmatism that deals with core philosophical issues. The first three are grounded in biology and anthropology. Many theoretical views across cognitive science and neuroscience regard these theses as foundational.

1.Animals are goal-oriented organisms, and their nervous systems function to sustain life in various practical ways.

2.Cognition in all its manifestations (intelligence/mind/consciousness) is embodied and not explicable apart from that bodily context.

3.Human cognition in all its modes should primarily be studied and comprehended in terms of its practical service for the ways that humans live.

Neuropragmatism emphasizes four additional theses, supported by behavioral and brain sciences, which enlarge the significance of the first three.

4.Cognitive systems are dynamically adaptive to organism-environment interactions, to deal with shifting conditions of situations as practical goals are pursued.

5.Under pressures from dealing with the environment, the brain modifies its neural connections to improve practical performance. The measure of this neural learning is improved habitual efficiency at specific routine tasks.

6.Complex cognitive processes are the brain’s work of effectively coordinating behavior for reliably achieving variable goals in a changing environment.

7.Human intelligence has so many cultural features for facilitating cooperative aims that it should primarily be studied and evaluated largely in terms of its service for social goals.

Five more theses of neuropragmatism remain to be mentioned, but we pause here for some elaboration of the first seven.

Neuropragmatism is tightly allied with theories of neuroplasticity, the vast unconscious, reason-emotion-volition integration, embodied cognition, and the extended mind. All these theories have prototypes in the works of classical pragmatists. Combating any philosophy of mind that depicts it as fundamentally passive, receptive, representational, cognitivist, or mechanistic, the classical pragmatists sought to understand the mind in its biological medium. All of the brain in all of its functioning for life must be taken into account. William James lent scientific respectability to the notion that the fringes and margins of consciousness extend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Pragmatism, Philosophy, and the Brain
• Part II  Cognition, Emotion, and the World
• Part III  Creativity, Education, and Application
• Part IV  Ethics, Neuroscience, and Possibility
• Index