Bryce Gessell (Southern Virginia University), "The Legend of Hermann the Cognitive Neuroscientist"

Forthcoming in Dialectica

By Bryce Gessell

Many and restless have been the nights I've lain awake, haunted by an inscrutable, godless query: what would happen if Kantian psychologists had access to an fMRI scanner? This doubt gave rise to countless others: what would the Kantians study? What would they conclude? And would they think their statistical analyses were all just giving a priori knowledge? These unholy thoughts tormented me so, that at last I felt compelled to put pen to paper, for I must needs excise the horror from my mind. But in so doing I begat the present progeny, "The Legend of Hermann the Cognitive Neuroscientist." Examine it with caution, reader, lest it cause in you that which it spawned in me. 

Ok, seriously, here's what actually happened. When I was in graduate school I spent a lot of years going to the lab meetings of various cognitive neuroscience research groups. At the same time I was doing a lot of reading in the history of psychology, and so I was getting into stuff like behaviorism but also earlier theories, like that of Helmholz and even earlier, like those of Christian Wolff and Kant. All this started me wondering, why do we think that our current theories in cognitive psychology are any better than theories of the past? Sure, the ones we have now are tested in certain ways and sometimes have mathematical components, but does that make a difference?

As I mention in the paper, I'm not the only one who has thought this; other people have wondered the same thing and have entertained a somewhat similar argument. The purpose of this paper is to situate that argument in a real-world context to show what it would actually be like if a Kantian were doing cognitive neuroscience research. Our boy Hermann is that Kantian. The first half of the paper is Hermann's legend. The second half breaks down the points made by the legend.

The claim is that Hermann would be able to carry on a research program and have great success with results that surpassed all accepted norms of rigor in that field. No one would take him seriously, of course, but they'd be wrong not to, since the same standards which justify contemporary psychological theories, if they justify them at all, would justify Hermann's theories.

I call this general problem the fundamental problem of cognitive ontologies. It's the problem of showing that your whole set of concepts and cognitive constructs--like those used in contemporary psychology--are better than any other set. After studying both psychology and its history a lot, I don't see how we'll be able to get around this problem. I'm pretty pessimistic about it, so hopefully I'm wrong. In any case I think this problem by itself is enough to challenge any attempt at a realist view on psychological theories.

As I shared this paper around with scientists both before and after it got accepted, reactions fell into two groups: graduate students loved it, those who ran labs mainly did not. Most philosophers agreed with the lab-runners and weren't into it. I suspect that most people's take on this paper will depend on how much real cognitive neuroscience research they have done as well as how much of their current livelihood is dependent on asking for grants to continue that research. 

One response I got from a colleague was especially telling. Speaking of cognitive neuroscience generally, he said, "We just aren't doing phrenology." No, you're not, but that isn't what the paper says. The paper says that the thing you're doing isn't epistemically distinguishable from phrenology--but maybe that won't make him (or you) feel any better.

Check out the paper here for loads of fun! If you have any thoughts about it, let me know: bryce.gessell@svu.edu.