Event:

Joint event MCN / Faculty of Philosophy
Program: Please see download link

Scientism is the attempt to extend the natural sciences beyond their proper domain. Cognitive neuroscience commonly transgresses its legitimate explanatory boundaries and misuses the psychological concepts it invokes. Conceptual questions need to be distinguished from empirical ones, and conceptual description from empirical theory. A prerequisite for fruitful neuroscientific investigations into human cognitive faculties is clarity concerning the concept of mind and its relation to the concept of the brain, as well as the concept of the body. Failure to attain such clarity is responsible for the mereological fallacy in neuroscience. Unclarity concerning concepts of psychology, such as voluntary action, memory, seeing, commonly leads to misconceived questions, mistaken interpretations of results of experiments, and misguided theories. These errors are remediable by adequate conceptual analysis.