Book Review: Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience

This book is a critique of the conceptual foundations of cognitive neuroscience. The 452-page book is a collaborative effort by an Oxford philosopher (Hacker) and a neuroscientist (Bennett). If we believe that many aspects of marketing suffer conceptual confusion, hidden by a dash of technological sophistication, we are in good company, as this is the charge made in this book against cognitive neuroscience—with the difference that the technological achievements of cognitive neuroscience are admitted to be substantial. Conceptual confusion is different from errors of fact since factual errors implicate false beliefs, whereas conceptual confusion leads to incoherence in that things are not connected logically. The book’s accusations are pertinent to all the cognitive sciences, including cognitive psychology since cognitive psychology draws from the same pool of concepts as cognitive neuroscience. In fact, the authors define cognitive neuroscience as operating across the boundary of the two fields of neurophysiology and psychology. Every major figure in the field of cognitive science comes in for criticism. But unlike David Hackett Fischer’s (1970) Historians’Fallacies, which accuses many of the most famous historians of having indulged in fallacious reasoning, or Harré and Secord’s (1973) The Explanation of Social Behavior, which describes the practice of cognitive psychology as analogous to alchemy, this book is concerned with the concepts of cognitive neuroscience, arguing that cognitive neuroscience has frequently and systematically confused conceptual and empirical questions. The cognitive science paradigm posits mental representations, viewing the brain as a computer (picturing cognition as computation composed of symbol manipulation) or as connectionist “neural nets” (modeling associations using artificial neuron networks). Neither approach has been found satisfactory in explaining emotion and motivation, although these are basic to buying behavior. The philosophical methodology employed in the book is analytic philosophy, an umbrella term that covers a variety of philosophical techniques. In particular, conceptual analysis, which focuses on the meaning in use of various concepts within some particular context or way of life. Conceptual analysis is part of the linguistic turn started by Wittgenstein, the philosopher, who invented the phrase language game to draw attention to the fact that language cannot be detached from the activities of which it is part. Conceptual analysis is the specific technique adopted where concept elucidation is achieved by focusing on the rule-governed use of words, in contrast to linguistic analysis, which focuses on the analysis of certain sorts of sentences. The argument of the book is that cognitive neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have taken words like sensation, perception, image, belief, consciousness, mind, memory, imagination, and emotion as used by the layperson, without analyzing how these words are used in various contexts and without even trying to give them other than the layman’s meaning. Conceptual confusion cannot be ignored since conceptual questions come before matters of truth or falsity: “They are questions concerning our forms of representation, not questions concerning the truth or falsehood of empirical questions” (p. 2). In contrast, the empirical science of cognitive neuroscience seeks to explain the neural conditions that make perceptual, cognitive, cogitative, affective, and volitional functions possible and the neural processes that occur when such capacities are exercised. When these empirical questions are addressed without adequate conceptual clarity, misconceived questions and misdirected research arise. This is what the authors allege has happened in neuroscience.