Abstract
This paper introduces the motivation and idea behind the recently founded interdisciplinary initiative Critical Neuroscience (http://www.critical-neuroscience.org). Critical Neuroscience is an approach that strives to understand, explain, contextualize, and, where called for, critique developments in and around the social, affective, and cognitive neurosciences with the aim to create the competencies needed to responsibly deal with new challenges and concerns emerging in relation to the brain sciences. It addresses scholars in the humanities as well as, importantly, neuroscientific practitioners, policy makers, and the public at large. Does neuroscience indeed have such wide-ranging effects or are we collectively overestimating its impacts at the expense of other important drivers of social and cultural change? Via what channels is neuroscience interacting with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, identity, and well-being? Importantly, Critical Neuroscience strives to make the results of these assessments relevant to scientific practice itself. It aspires to motivate neuroscientists to be involved in the analysis of contextual factors, historical trajectories, conceptual difficulties, and potential consequences in connection to their empirical work. This paper begins to spell out a philosophical foundation for the project by outlining examples of the interaction taking place between the neurosciences and the social and cultural contexts in which they are embedded and by exposing some of the assumptions and argumentative patterns underlying dominant approaches. Recent anthropological work will be discussed to convey a sense of the de facto interactions between neuroscientific knowledge, its promissory projections, and the self-understandings of laypeople. This can be seen as a first step towards a phenomenology of the “seductive allure” that the neurosciences are exerting upon both the academic and the popular imagination. The concept of “critique” relevant to the project's overall orientation is outlined in the final section.
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Notes
I use “cognitive neuroscience” in a broad way to denote all those neuroscientific approaches and subfields that deal more or less directly with higher-level mental and behavioral phenomena in humans. Thus, “cognitive neuroscience” as understood here encompasses fields such as social, affective, and also the newly emerging cultural neuroscience. If not explicitly stated otherwise, unqualified uses of the term “neuroscience” in this paper are meant to refer to cognitive neuroscience in this broad sense.
Besides the recent manifesto by Lynch (2009), one can point to the following selection of publications that make some noise about an alleged “neuroscientific revolution”: Edelman (1992), Crick (1994), Churchland (2002), Zeki (2008), Metzinger (2009). Much more material from surprisingly diverse areas can be obtained by typing “neuroscientific revolution” into an Internet search engine.
In a recent resourceful study, Saskia K. Nagel has provided a state-of-the-art account of new developments in several areas of neurotechnologies and discussed the most pressing ethical and social concerns that are raised by them (see Nagel 2010, especially Sections 4.2 and 5.5).
For an initial outline of the project's aims and structure, see Choudhury et al. (2009). A collection of essays on Critical Neuroscience is scheduled to come out in early 2011 at Wiley-Blackwell, see Choudhury and Slaby (2010). The project is in full swing as an independent research and project group operating from Berlin, Germany. See http://www.critical-neuroscience.org.
More on this in Choudhury et al. (2009).
A promising early example of Critical Neuroscience research is outlined in Campbell (2010).
“I argue that one fruitful idea for understanding transient mental illness is the ecological niche, not just social, not just medical, not just coming from the patient, not just from the doctors, but from the concatenation of an extraordinarily large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment provide a stable home for certain types of manifestation of illness” (Hacking 1998, 13).
The highly innovate VOICES project at the London School of Economics, led by Ilina Singh, tries to bring the children's perspective into the debates surrounding ADHD. See http://www.addingvoices.com.
To this ecological niche of ADHD most probably belongs the heightened systematic attention being paid to children's behavior and development, virtually from the cradle onward. Another aspect is the new informational environment with which today's children are inevitably confronted, with television, computers, video games, and mobile phones providing constant, albeit highly discontinuous informational input. Not to forget changed practices and expectations on the side of teachers, parents, and caregivers that leave less and less room for what once was considered quite normal “boyhood behavior” (see Shorter 1997, 289/290).
For more on this, see Putnam (1975).
A good example might be schizophrenia. On one hand, it seems uncontroversial that schizophrenia has a robust neurological foundation, but on the other hand, it seems equally clear that schizophrenia is and has been subject to significant historical changes, in terms of symptoms and prevalence (see Boyle 1990 and Hacking 1999, 116/117). For a more detailed analysis of Hacking's conception of making up people, see Brinkmann (2005).
Thanks to Max Stadler for suggesting the term “hidden anthropology.”
The term “brainhood” has been coined by historian of science Fernando Vidal (see Vidal 2009. Vidal and his collaborators have analyzed this trend extensively; see for instance the project website http://www.brainhood.net that provides plenty of resources and further references.
There are several stark statements in the literature that express this persuasion. For instance, neuroscientists Francis Crick (1994) writes: “you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free-will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Or take this one by Patricia Churchland (2002): “The weight of evidence now implies that it is the brain, […], that feels, thinks, decides.”
For a refreshing, sharply argued and scientifically well-grounded rebuttal of the ideology of “brainhood,” see Noë (2009)—a book that can very well be read as a direct counter to Metzinger's The Ego-Tunnel.
As an academic disciple of Axel Honneth and a member of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Hartmann can probably be seen as a new-generation representative of Frankfurt School critical theory.
It is a new science whose shiny machinery and highly visual results create the image of eminent clarity, objectivity, and ultimately, authority. I come back to the imaginative appeal of current neuroscience and its relation to the alleged authority of its findings in the “Real responses” section. See also Dumit (2004) and Joyce (2008, especially chapter 3).
One example for the trend towards normative first nature arguments, explicitly stated by Hartmann, is William Casebeer's book Natural Ethical Facts (2003). In it, Casebeer attempts to ground ethics on evolutionary biology and connectionist cognitive science plus recent brain imaging studies with moral judgment tasks. Casebeer's “natural ethical facts” are exactly what Hartmann points to in his critique of the normative first nature argumentative pattern. A somewhat related, although more carefully articulated, tendency is to be found in the work of Joshua Greene, a philosopher who has done empirical work (using fMRI) on ethical decision making (see, e.g., Greene 2003).
For more on a possible approach to critique relevant to Critical Neuroscience, see the “On the notion of “critique”” section.
Cohn elaborates upon this in the following manner: “Interestingly, the patients repeatedly insist that their enthusiasm is not driven by a crude desire to refute social stigma associated with their particular condition, since many actually don't want to lose this aspect of their identity. This frequently left me confused: on the one hand, they would willingly volunteer to participate in imaging studies, enduring all the inconvenience that it entailed and aware it would not have any clinical consequence for them, yet, in the act of looking at their own brain on a screen, or taking a copy home with them, they would say that making their illness physical was largely not about wanting to completely divorce themselves from their condition” (Cohn 2010b).
On the difficult notion of a “brain fact,” meant as an application to neuroscience of Ludwik Fleck's highly nontrivial concept of a scientific fact, see Choudhury et al. (2009).
The following is not without alternatives—there are different ways to be critical that are equally relevant to Critical Neuroscience. A related but slightly different approach has been sketched in Choudhury et al. (2009).
For the Frankfurt School perspective, I mostly draw on recent work by Axel Honneth (2009) and Martin Hartmann (2010); see also Hartmann and Honneth (2006). A broadly Foucauldian approach to science studies is developed by Rouse (1987, 1996), while an application to trends in and around today's biomedical science is provided by Rose (2006) and some of his collaborators at the LSE's Bioscience and Society program.
Something like this is also at the core of Joseph Rouse's impressive manifesto on philosophical naturalism How Scientific Practices Matter (Rouse 2002). Note that the ideas sketched in the following are neither a direct elaboration of Latour's nor of Rouses' ideas, but something largely independent of both.
Thus, in effect, this is a measure to counter the increasing institutional power and public influence of what Nikolas Rose calls the “new pastors of the soma,” see the “Normative first nature” section and Rose (2006). A valuable discussion of this problem area, albeit in the context of research in human genetics, is provided by Kerr and Cunningham-Burley (2000).
I take up Honneth's notion in a rather loose manner, divorcing it from the specific context of a theory of rationality implicit in approaches to “critique” from a Frankfurt School perspective. This point needs further elaboration and discussion on another occasion.
Unfortunately, though important, this outline of what is meant by “critique” in the context of our project has to remain sketchy. For the full treatment, see the introduction to Choudhury and Slaby (2010).
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Acknowledgements
My work on this text and on the creation of the Critical Neuroscience initiative in general has been enabled by a research grant provided by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany, within the initiative European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities, research project “Neuroscience in Context.” I was greatly inspired by discussions with Suparna Choudhury, Simon Cohn, and Martin Hartmann enabled through the “Neuroscience in Context” project initiative. Moreover, valuable comments on oral presentations of earlier versions of the manuscript were provided by audiences in Berlin, Osnabrück, Marburg, and Würzburg. Special thanks for commenting on all or parts of the manuscript to Felicity Callard, Lutz Fricke, Jan-Christoph Heilinger, Christoph Demmerling, Malte Dreyer, Saskia K. Nagel, Max Stadler, and an anonymous referee for this journal.
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I thank the German Volkswagen Foundation for funding my work on this article.
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Slaby, J. Steps towards a Critical Neuroscience . Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 397–416 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9170-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9170-2