文档介绍：FINAL DRAFT
October 18, 2005
for APA Eastern Division Meeting, December 2005
[ words]
Philosophy as Naive Anthropology:
Comment on t and Hacker
t and Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003), a
collaboration between a philosopher (Hacker) and a neuroscientist (t), is an ambitious
attempt to reformulate the research agenda of cognitive neuroscience by demonstrating that
cognitive scientists and other theorists, myself among them, have been bewitching each other by
misusing language in a systematically “incoherent” and conceptually “confused” way. In both
style and substance, the book harks back to Oxford in the early 1960's, when Ordinary Language
Philosophy ruled, and Ryle and Wittgenstein were the authorities on the meanings of our
everyday mentalistic or psychological terms. I myself am a product of that time and place (as is
Searle, for that matter), and I find much to agree with in their goals and presuppositions, and
before turning to my criticisms, which will be severe, I want to highlight what I think is exactly
right in their approach–the oft-forgotten lessons of Ordinary Language Philosophy.
Neuroscientific research, . . . .abuts the psychological, and clarity regarding the
achievements of brain research presupposes clarity regarding the categories of ordinary
psychological description–that is, the categories of sensation and perception, cognition
and recollection, cogitation and imagination, emotion and volition. To the extent that
neuroscientists fail to grasp the contour lines of the relevant categories, they run the risk
not only of asking the wrong questions, but also of misinterpreting their own
experimental results. (p115).
Just When neuroscientists help themselves to the ordinary terms pose the
lore I have dubbed “folk psychology,”2, they need to proceed with the utmost caution, since these
1 My purpose in Content an