It’s not clear this follows. Carnap’s quote is beautiful, thanks for posting it.

That book you linked to is kooky, but it also isn’t neuroscience.

“The acceptance or rejection of abstract linguistic forms, just as the acceptance or rejection of any other linguistic forms in any branch of science, will finally be decided by their efficiency as instruments, the ratio of the results achieved to the amount and complexity of the efforts required. To decree dogmatic prohibitions of certain linguistic forms instead of testing them by their success or failure in practical use is worse than futile; it is positively harmful because it may obstruct scientific progress. The history of science shows examples of such prohibitions based on prejudices deriving from religious, mythological, metaphysical, or other irrational sources, which slowed up the developments for shorter of longer periods of time. Let us learn from the lessons of history. Let us grant to those who work in any special field of investigation the freedom to use any form of expression which seems useful to them; the work in the field will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms which have no useful function. Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.”

The problem with this passage, and I think with your comments as well, is that it neglects the difference between standards of utility and standards of truth. If the claim is that there is no standard of truth that isn’t first a standard of utility, it follows that there is no difference at all between metaphorical truth and literal truth. Surely this is highly implausible. It is better for a scientific discourse (indeed, for any discourse) that its speakers keep track of when they are speaking literally and when they are not. When I am speaking literally, there are no people in my head.

The point isn’t that there can be no new uses for words. The point is that the speaker should be aware when the use is both literal and new, and should give (as best as she is able) the criteria of meaning that the new use should have. And when the use is metaphorical, clarity demands that the speaker explicitly acknowledge as much (as long as we’re talking about works of science rather than works of poetry).

I’d like to put down my support for N. N. here and note that I would like neuroscientists to read Bennett & Hacker’s book as well. I enjoyed it.

Gibson goes into much more detail in his “Ecological Approach To Visual Perception”, which I highly recommend.

It helps people understand the results.

Taken to one extreme, you could argue that we should create neologisms for every new phenomenon we find. Things would quickly become a mess.

But what I gather Hacker is objecting to most is the use of intentionalistic descriptions of brain activities that would be *different* from those applied to the person. For example, saying that your visual system forms a hypothesis, interprets sensory data, makes an inference to the best explanation, fills in the representation of missing details, etc. These would not be occurences of a person-level psychological description of the subject — it is (normally) no part of your mental life that you apply interpretations to things on the retina (you can’t, because you can’t see them!) If one goes on to draw philosophical conclusions from such descriptions (e.g. about our epistemological relation to the world), I think it is appropriate to take the view that they involve conceptual confusions.

However, Hacker’s approach to clearing up confusions has always seemed disappointing to me. His hero Wittgenstein compared philosophy to a kind of therapy, by which someone in the grip of a picture might be brought to a clearer understanding of concepts. Such a therapy depends in part on the fact that, in other contexts, the person already tacitly understands and uses the relevant concepts correctly, and may require getting the sufferrer to recognize and acknowledge the sources of the confusion. But Hacker writes like someone who, having either been cured himself or never having had the disease, just mocks and sneers at the sufferers. Unlike Wittgenstein, he leaves out the therapy! This is what makes his work come off like doctrinaire apriorism (language policing) and makes for ineffective therapy.

But the fact that Hacker’s approach is not effective does not mean there is not plenty of conceptual confusion in this vicinity!

I’m not sure about the consciousness stuff being easier (depending on what you are actually claiming), but it would be interesting to see that fleshed out more. I’m a fan of the hunt for neural and functional correlates of consciousness, and have not been impressed by philosophers’ claims that ‘there is no place where it all comes together.’ But perhaps I’ll write up a little bit on that for my neuroscience blog. Note I’m not saying you are saying that, I was just making a pre-emptive strike

(”Your brain is reading this” is a cute and provocative blog-post title, not anything I see as having any promise for serious theoretical usefulness.)

I like the sounds of your Wittgenstein and likewise like to read him as being on the same team as Davidson, Quine, and Dennett. I also like to add Rorty and Sellars to the line-up.

Because of this I find it somewhat disappointing to read, as Eric says, that this is “just one of the big divisions in philosophy. Philosophy as analysis versus philosophy as generative and continuous with science”; or, as N. N. puts it, “a disagreement between the philosophical traditions of Wittgenstein and Quine.” One of my own main influences in philosophy is Quine’s close colleague Davidson, whom I read (somewhat idiosyncratically, I begin to fear) as fairly close to my other main influence, an apparently non-Hackerian Wittgenstein. So it can be a salutary, if puzzling, reminder to see others convinced of a deep gulf between the two “traditions.” (Seriously, mention one to certain devotees of the other and watch lips curl in contempt.) Of course philosophy is “continuous with science,” but not in any interesting sense, except that it is not merely analyzing the meanings of words in scrupulous abstraction from any empirical inquiry. But “linguistic analysis” in this sense is not what (my) Wittgenstein is about (which means I have to explain certain famous dicta in Philosophical Investigations around which certain traditional interpretations have accreted, but I’ll spare you all that here).

I won’t go into it, but just for the record this “Wittgensteinian” has no problem with Dennett’s use of “behavioral” terminology for subcognitive quasi-agents, and this for Eric’s reasons: it is scientific practitioners, the people who actually use the language in question, who decide which extensions of common meanings (or, for that matter, neologisms) pay their way in empirical terms (although I’m not sure I would require that they be formally “operationalized,” if I know what that means). I would say, though, that the flat statement that “my brain is reading this” strikes me as highly unlikely to be useful (I would even agree with N. N. that, as we would put it, “brains can’t read”). But I’m not ruling it out. My attitude is: if you want to talk that way, knock yourself out. But you *might* be chasing your tails, and not – this is important – for purely empirical reasons (as if all you needed to do was try harder or think up the right experiment). Yet I imagine you knew that.

You might consider (what I hope is) an easier case. For a long time (I hope they’re not still at it) people were looking for “the seat of consciousness” in the brain, as if naturalism required that consciousness have a distinct spatial location. That strikes me, as I’m sure it does N. N., as a confusion properly called “conceptual”. Maybe people needed to try to find such a thing and fail, or, in particular, to see *how* they failed, as certain concepts central to agency seemed to come apart in their hands. But it’s hard to see this comedy of errors from outside and not think “gee, I could have told you *that*”.

So a neuron ‘disciminates’ because different causes have different effects on it? By that measure, what doesn’t ‘discriminate’?

You could use the same argument against using this criterion for behavioral discrimination, so either your argument is wrong, or all the psychologists using such measures are wrong. Second, neuronal discrimination is explanatorily relevant for behavioral discrimination (see my paper on leech CNS above). Behavioral discrimination is impossible without neuronal discrimination. How well will someone behaviorally discriminate faces when their nervous system is removed? Third, we tend to study neuronal discrimination of stimuli using the same or similar sets of stimuli as we do for behavioral discrimination. So same stimuli, exact same measure of response, but it is really important that we use a different word? Seems like a strange battle to pick.

A philosopher interested in this in a substantive way needs to get up to speed on sensory psychophysics and the neural coding literature to get familiar with the naunces of the different terminology systems used. It is easy to come off clever with Oxbridge word ninja but it is ultimately unsubstantive.

Rather than continue to engage in quibbles about specifics, I think everyone should have enough information about my general view to decide whether it is reasonable to use a word in a new context, with a slightly different but related meaning, to describe the behavior of neurons (yes, the behavior of neurons).

So a neuron ‘disciminates’ because different causes have different effects on it? By that measure, what doesn’t ‘discriminate’?

Your parenthetical mention of behavior is significant. To discriminate is to behave in certain ways. Neurons can’t behave, and so can’t discriminate. And of course, neurons can’t notice differences for the same reason.