The Limits of Neuro-Talk

Matthew B. Crawford
If he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must
have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant
temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that
is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that
his method must be appropriate and successful.
–E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations
of Modern Science (1925)

I n this nascent age of “neurolaw,” “neuromarketing,” “neuropolicy,” “neuro-

ethics,” “neurophilosophy,” “neuroeconomics,” and even “neurotheology,”
it becomes necessary to disentangle the science from the scientism. There
is a host of cultural entrepreneurs currently grasping at various forms of
authority through appropriations of neuroscience, presented to us in the
corresponding dialects of neuro-talk. Such talk is often accompanied by a
picture of a brain scan, that fast-acting solvent of critical faculties.
Elsewhere in this issue, O. Carter Snead offers a critique of the use of
brain scans in the courtroom in which he alludes to, but ultimately brackets,
questions about the scientific rigor of such use. For the sake of argument,
he proceeds on the assumption that neuroimaging is competent to do what
it is often claimed to do, namely, provide a picture of human cognition.
But there are some basic conceptual problems hovering about the inter-
pretation of brain scans as pictures of mentation. In parsing these problems,
it becomes apparent that the current “neuro” enthusiasm should be under-
stood in the larger context of scientism, a pervasive cultural tendency with
its own logic. A prominent feature of this logic is the overextension of some
mode of scientific explanation, or model, to domains in which it has little
predictive or explanatory power. Such a lack of intrinsic fit is often no bar-
rier to the model nonetheless achieving great authority in those domains,
through a kind of histrionics. As Alasdair MacIntyre has shown in another
context (that of social science), all that is required is a certain kind of per-
formance by those who foist the model upon us, a dramatic imitation of
explanatory competence that wows us and cows us with its self-confidence.
At such junctures, the heckler performs an important public service.

Matthew B. Crawford is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the
University of Virginia and a contributing editor of The New Atlantis.

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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

Taxonomies of Mind
As applied to medical diagnosis (for example, in diagnosing a brain
tumor), a brain scan is similar in principle to a mammogram: it is a way
of seeing inside the body. Its success at doing so is straightforward and
indubitable. However, the use of neuroimaging in psychology is a funda-
mentally different kind of enterprise: it is a research method the validity
of which depends on a premise. That premise is that mental processes can
be analyzed into separate and distinct faculties, components, or modules,
and further that these modules are instantiated, or realized, in localized
brain regions. Jerry Fodor, the Rutgers University philosopher of mind,
begins his classic 1983 monograph The Modularity of Mind thus:
Faculty psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of
hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty
psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally differ-
ent kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to
explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the
apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima
facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and
cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

With its due regard for the heterogeneity of our mental experience,
this modularity thesis is indeed attractive as a working hypothesis. The
difficulty lies in arriving at a specific taxonomy of the mental. The list of
faculties Fodor gives in the paragraph above could be replaced with an
indefinite number of competing taxonomies—and indeed, Fodor gives a
taxonomy of taxonomies. The discipline of psychology exhibits a lack of
agreement on the most basic elements of the mental.
The problem of classifying the mental is one that infects the neuro-
imaging enterprise at its very roots. Some observers argue this problem
is fatal to the interpretation of brain images as representing well-defined
cognitive processes. One such critic is William Uttal, a psychologist at
Arizona State University. In his 2001 book The New Phrenology: The Limits
of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain, Uttal shows that there has been
no convergence of mental taxonomies over time, as one might expect in a
mature science. “Rather,” he writes, “a more or less expedient and highly
transitory system of definitions has been developed in each generation as
new phenomena are observed or hypothetical entities created.”
Uttal suggests that the perennial need to divide psychology text-
books into topic chapters—“pattern recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual

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 THE LIMITS OF NEURO-TALK

memory,” “speech perception,” and the like—has repeatedly induced an

unwitting reification of such terms, whereby they come to be understood
as separable, independent modules of mental function. The ad hoc origin
of such mental modules subsides from the collective memory of investiga-
tors, who then set out to search for their specific loci in the brain.
Ideally, the phenomenological work of arriving at a taxonomy of the
mental would be accomplished prior to the effort to tie mental functions
to brain regions, because without such a taxonomy in hand, there is a real
risk that arbitrary features of the imaging technology will yield artifacts
that may then, like textbook categories, get reified as mental modules.
Such artifacts are just the tip of a metaphysical iceberg of the sort Burtt
warned of in the epigraph above.
Moreover, an even more fundamental problem haunts the modular
theory of mind assumed in cognitive neuroscience: it may be that neither
mental functions, nor the physical systems that realize them, are decom-
posable into independent modules. Uttal argues that rather than distinct
entities, the various features of cognition are likely to be properties of a
more general mental activity that is distributed throughout the brain. For
example, is it possible neatly to distinguish perception from attention?
Uttal asks of attention,
Is it a “stuff ” that can be divided, allocated, and focused and that
is available only in limited amounts, and thus can be localized in a
particular part of the brain? Or, to the contrary, is it an attribute or
characteristic of perception . . . inseparable as the diameter or whiteness
of a golf ball is from the physical ball itself ? . . . It seems plausible that
many of the psychological components or modules we seek to locate
in a particular region of the brain should be thought of as properties
of a unified mental “object” rather than as analyzable and isolatable
entities.

This argument is, perhaps, a bit tendentious—who in the neuroimag-

ing literature suggests attention is a “stuff ”? Rather, attention is thought
to be a function realized in some brain region. But this correction does not
vacate the force of Uttal’s criticism, because functions, like properties, are
distributed (they require a whole system or mechanism to be realized), and
one must pause to ask: what are the boundaries of the pertinent system? A
danger inherent in the localization thesis may be illuminated by analogy
to an internal combustion engine. In describing an engine, one might be
tempted to say, “the opening of the intake valve is caused by the movement
of the rocker arm.” Except that the rocker is, in turn, set in motion by

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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

the camshaft, the camshaft by the crankshaft, the crank by a connecting

rod, the rod by the piston. But of course, the piston won’t move unless
the intake valve opens to let the air-fuel mixture in. This logic is finally
circular because, really, it is the entire mechanism that “causes” the open-
ing of the intake valve; any less holistic view truncates the causal picture
and issues in statements that are, at best, partially true. Given that the
human brain is more complexly interconnected than a motor by untold
orders of magnitude, it is a dubious undertaking to say that any localized
organic structure is the sufficient cause and exclusive locus of something
like “reason” or “emotion.”
Such dichotomous mental categories are regularly employed by social
scientists who have taken up neuro-talk, and in the popular press: the
amygdala is said to be the seat of emotion, the prefrontal cortex of reason.
Yet when I get angry, for example, I generally do so for a reason; typically
I judge myself or another wronged. To cleanly separate emotion from rea-
son-giving makes a hash of human experience, and seems to be attractive
mainly as a way of rendering the mind methodologically tractable, even if
at the cost of realism.
Such naïve psychological modularity can get installed in institu-
tional practices that have real coercive power, like lie-detection. There
are now at least two companies, No Lie MRI, based in San Diego, and
Cephos, based in Boston, that are actively commercializing the applica-
tion of neuroimaging to lie detection. Margaret Talbot, writing in The
New Yorker in 2007, described the neuroimaging studies of deception
conducted by Daniel Langleben, a psychiatrist at the University of
Pennsylvania, that undergird the claims of No Lie MRI: “These alleg-
edly seminal studies look exclusively at . . . people who were instructed to
lie about trivial matters in which they had little stake. An incentive of
twenty dollars can hardly compare with, say, your freedom, reputation,
children, or marriage—any or all of which might be at risk in an actual
lie-detection scenario.”
This is to treat lying as a “cognitive” process in the narrowest sense, as
opposed to a mental act with inherent ethical content and pragmatic con-
sequences. Here cognitive science reveals its roots in “the linguistic turn”
in philosophy that began with the rise of logical positivism a century ago.
The logical positivists were preoccupied with consistency of sentences,
and conceived reason to be syntactical or rule-like. It is what computers
do. Such a view takes no account of what Henri Bergson called “the ten-
sion of consciousness,” that feature of an embodied being who has interests
and finds himself situated in a world. Talbot nicely elaborates the richness

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 THE LIMITS OF NEURO-TALK

of the phenomena we gather under the term “lie,” and the problem it poses
for any narrowly cognitive scheme of lie detection:
small, polite lies; big, brazen, self-aggrandizing lies; lies to protect
or enchant our children; lies that we don’t really acknowledge to
ourselves as lies; complicated alibis that we spend days rehearsing.
Certainly, it’s hard to imagine that all these lies will bear the identical
neural signature. In their degrees of sophistication and detail, their
moral weight, their emotional valence, lies are as varied as the people
who tell them. As Montaigne wrote, “The reverse side of the truth has
a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.”

Trying to identify a universal, merely formal element of real-life

lying and disentangle it from emotional capacities, moral dispositions,
and worldly situations, on the supposition that the function “lie” has its
own distinct ontology, may make as much sense as trying to separate
the whiteness of a golf ball from the ball, to use Uttal’s analogy. The
thesis of mental modularity seems to be attractive mainly because it is
convenient for talking about thinking and, as we shall see, for designing
experiments. But notice that it can also undergird technologies such as
brain-scan lie detection that may come to have real consequences in the
world—affecting “your freedom, reputation, children, or marriage,” as
Talbot reminds us. Just because such technologies aren’t adequate to our
mental reality doesn’t mean they won’t be deployed; the checkered history
of past lie detection technologies shows this. It is significant that No Lie
MRI solicits inquiries from corporate customers on its website. Even if
the technology doesn’t pass the bar of public trust for use by civil authori-
ties, it may satisfy corporate managers looking for new ways to intimidate
employees.
Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must
first translate those human problems into narrowly technical problems,
framed in terms of some theoretically tractable model and a correspond-
ing method. Such tractability offers a collateral benefit: the intellectual
pleasure that comes with constructing and tinkering with the model.
But there is then an almost irresistible temptation to, as E. A. Burtt said,
turn one’s method into a metaphysics—that is, to suppose the world such
that one’s method is appropriate to it. When this procedure is applied to
human beings, the inevitable result is that the human is defined down-
ward. Thus, for example, thinking becomes “information processing.” We
are confronted with the striking reversal wherein cognitive science looks
to the computer to understand what human thinking is.

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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

Deep Problems of Instrumentation

If the critique of mental modularity is valid, how can one account for the
fact that brain scans do, in fact, reveal well-defined areas that “light up” in
response to various cognitive tasks? In the case of functional (as opposed
to structural) neuroimaging, what you are seeing when you look at a
brain scan is the result of a subtraction. Functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), for example, produces a map of the rate of oxygen use in
different parts of the brain, which stands as a measure of metabolic activ-
ity. Or rather, it depicts the differential rate of oxygen use: one first takes
a baseline measurement in the control condition, then a second measure-
ment while the subject is performing some cognitive task. The baseline
measurement is then subtracted from the on-task measurement. The rea-
soning, seemingly plausible, is that whatever shows up in the subtraction
represents the metabolic activity associated solely with the cognitive task
in question.
One immediately obvious (but usually unremarked) problem is that
this method eliminates from the picture the more massive fact, which is
that the entire brain is active in both conditions. A false impression of neat
functional localization is given by the presentation of differential brain
scans which subtract out all the distributed functions. This subtractive
method is ideally suited to the imaging technology, and deeply consistent
with the modular theory of mind. But is this modular theory of mind per-
haps attractive in part because it lends itself to the subtractive method?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some of the more critical cognitive
neuroscientists complained that researchers were simply sticking people
in the magnet to see what “lights up,” with no real theory in hand, and
such studies would get published in prominent scientific journals. These
critiques had some effect, and the discipline has mostly moved beyond
looking for “the spot for X.” Indeed, cognitive neuroscientists deserve
credit for the methodological finesse they have developed in response to
the complexity of mind.
In a 1999 article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cambridge neuro-
scientist Friedemann Pulvermuller offered a thorough account of the
difficulties that arise in the effort to localize linguistic functions. The
problem with the subtractive method, he wrote, is that “in many experi-
ments there are [not one, but] several differences between critical and
control conditions,” on such dimensions as perception (a word is seen or
not on a screen), attention, classification (the word may be a noun or verb
or meaningless pseudo-word, for example), motor response (the subject

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 THE LIMITS OF NEURO-TALK

may be required to hit a button as part of his or her response), search

processes (the subject may need to recall the word), and semantic infer-
ences. Given that “an area is found to ‘light up’ . . . it is not clear which of
the many different cognitive processes relates to the difference in brain
activity.” Similarly, Michele T. Diaz and Gregory McCarthy write in the
November 2007 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that “the
coactivation of cognitive processes unrelated to word processing per se . . .
likely influence[s] the pattern of activation obtained in even the simplest
word processing tasks.”
University of Chicago “social neuroscientist” John T. Cacioppo and
colleagues offered a philosophically sophisticated treatment of these
methodological hazards of neuroimaging in a 2003 article in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. They describe as a “category error” the
intuitively appealing notion that the organization of cognitive phe-
nomena maps in a 1:1 fashion into the organization of the underlying
neural substrates. Memories, emotions, and beliefs, for instance, were
each once thought to be localized in a single site in the brain. Current
evidence, however, now suggests that most complex psychological or
behavioral concepts do not map into a single center in the brain. What
appears at one point in time to be a singular construct (e.g., memory),
when examined in conjunction with evidence from the brain (e.g.,
lesions) reveals a more complex and interesting organization at both
levels (e.g., declarative vs. procedural memory processes). Even if there
is localization, it will likely be elusive until there are coherent links
between psychological–behavioral constructs and neural operations.

As these articles indicate, the problem of distributed, mutually

intertwined mental functions is very much at issue in the trenches of neu-
roscience, however much grand theorists may find it expedient to ignore
such difficulties and insist, as Steven Pinker does in How the Mind Works,
that “the mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a
specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with
the world.” Simplifications like this are not culturally innocent, as they
provide the indispensable pretext for the grab at authority by entrepre-
neurs such as No Lie MRI, which in turn may come to justify the exercise
of coercive power by civil authorities.
Perhaps the most fundamental limitation of functional imaging, vis-
à-vis the claim that it allows us to “peer inside the mind,” is that there is
a basic disconnect of time scale. Brain scans are emphatically not images
of cognition in process, as the neural activity of interest occurs on a time

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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

scale orders of magnitude faster than hemodynamic response (the proxy

for neural activity measured by fMRI). Uttal writes,
This raises, once again, a profoundly disconcerting problem for the users
of imaging procedures: the cumulative measure of brain metabolism is
neither theoretically nor empirically linked to the momentary details of
the neural network at the micro level—the essential level of informa-
tion processing that is really the psychoneural equivalent of mentation.
From this point of view, the “signs” of brain activity obtained from the
scanning system are no more “codes” of what is going on than any
other physiological correlate, such as the electrodermal response or an
electromyogram.

I take Uttal to mean that a brain image provided by fMRI may serve
as a sign of mentation, but because of the time-scale difference, it does not
preserve the machine states that (on the computational theory of mind)
encode mentation. With such signs, we do not have a picture of a mecha-
nism. We have a sign that there is a mechanism. But the discovery that there
is a mechanism is no discovery at all, unless one was previously a dualist.

Respect the Machine

But suppose imaging technology were one day to achieve both the spatial
and temporal resolution to give us a precise picture, down to the neuronal
level, of the physical correlates of mentation as it occurs. What then? To
fully understand even a simple mechanism can be a surprisingly elusive
undertaking, as is known by anyone who has—to use another engineering
example—tried to set up a train of beveled gears that transmit a rotary
motion through a right angle (as in the Ducati motorcycle engines of a few
decades ago). In such a gear train there are forces acting in directions that
do not correspond to any of the observed motions. There are thrust and
side forces that are intellectually manageable (they can be expressed mathe-
matically) but practically far from trivial. An experienced engine builder may
require an entire day playing with shims and tolerances to get it right.
Though beveled gears are only barely more complex than the simple
machines of Archimedes (the lever, the pulley, etc.), the human race had
to await the genius of Leonardo to receive them, like some revelation.
At a much higher level of sophistication, mechanisms can be intractably
complex things—famously, the most subtle applications of science and
engineering have as yet been unable to fully reproduce the prized charac-
teristics of Stradivari’s violins, for example. The human brain, everyone
agrees, presents complexity that is simply colossal by comparison—by

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 THE LIMITS OF NEURO-TALK

one estimate, the number of possible neuronal pathways is larger than the
number of particles in the universe.
But for a certain kind of intellectual, the mere act of positing that
some mystery has a mechanical basis gives satisfaction. A heady feeling of
mastery rushes in prematurely with the idea that in principle nothing lies
beyond our powers of comprehension. But to be knowable in principle is
quite different from being known in fact. Hands-on mechanical experience
frequently induces an experience of perplexity in formally trained engi-
neers. We may be emboldened to speculate, in a sociological mode, wheth-
er a lack of such mechanical experience “enables” a certain intellectual
comportment which doesn’t give the machine its due, and isn’t sufficiently
impressed with this difference between the knowable and the known.
A species of metaphysical enthusiast can often be seen skipping gaily
across this gap between the knowable and the known, acting in the capac-
ity of publicist for some research program which, on cooler analysis, is
seen to be in its infancy. One such is Paul Churchland of the University of
California, San Diego, who writes in his 1995 book The Engine of Reason,
the Seat of the Soul that “we are now in a position to explain how our vivid
sensory experience arises in the sensory cortex of our brains. . . [and is]
embodied in a vast chorus of neural activity. . . . [ W]e can now understand
how the infant brain slowly develops a framework of concepts. . . and
how the matured brain deploys that framework almost instantaneously:
to recognize similarities, to grasp analogies, and to anticipate both the
immediate and the distant future.” As Jerry Fodor succinctly put it in
a review of Churchland’s book, “none of this is true”; it is “the idiom of
grant proposals.” The critical element of Churchland’s hype lies in the
distinction between knowing that “our vivid sensory experience arises
in the sensory cortex” and explaining how it does so, which latter, he
claims, is now accomplished. We surely know that “the infant brain slowly
develops a framework of concepts” and “the matured brain deploys that
framework almost instantaneously,” but how? Not even to a first glimmer,
as Fodor says.

Of Dogs and Protons

The conceit that brain scans present an image of human cognition laid
out before us for full inspection holds obvious attraction. This positive
appeal is backed up by a horror at what is thought to be the only alterna-
tive to a thoroughly reductive materialism: some form of spiritualism or,
more broadly, something “anti-scientific.”

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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

But one must make a distinction between ontological reduction and

explanatory reduction. This distinction is a commonplace in the philosophy
of science, but it is routinely ignored in the hype surrounding cognitive neu-
roscience. The error goes like this: from the fact that some phenomenon is
composed of and dependent upon more fundamental parts, it is thought to
follow that any explanation of the higher-level phenomenon can be replaced
by, or translated without residue into, an explanation at the lower level of its
parts. Once this reduction is (putatively) accomplished, the ontological sta-
tus of the higher-level phenomenon is demoted to that of mere phenomenon:
appearance versus reality. Our gaze is shifted away from the thing we ini-
tially wanted to understand, to some underlying substrate. This procedure
is thought to be enjoined by the conviction we all share with the natural
scientist: there is only one universe, and it is made up of physical particles.
Yet the natural scientist knows just as surely that our best account of
that universe is, in many cases, not forthcoming from physics. We turn
instead to chemistry or biology. The need for such “special” sciences that
take higher-level structures as given does not compromise the bedrock
ontological supposition that there is a single universe, made up of physical
particles. One can have one’s materialism while admitting the autonomy
of higher-level disciplines. There is much confusion on this point, and it
seems to be bolstered by a fear that to be less than completely reductive in
one’s explanatory posture somehow commits one to “spiritualism.”
The explanatory independence of biology, its irreducibility to physics,
is consistent with biological entities being composed of and dependent
upon physical entities. The biologist believes that the dog is made up of
nothing but protons, neutrons, and electrons, but he does not try to give an
account of the dog at that level. Is this merely due to the limitations of our
current state of knowledge? Would it be possible in principle to construct
a comprehensive understanding of the dog starting from particle physics?
The consensus view appears to be that it is not possible even in principle,
due to considerations of complexity and non-linearity, or thermodynamic
irreversibility (take your pick). Even within physics, lower-level accounts
sometimes presuppose structure that is identifiable only at a higher level,
or depend upon boundary-conditions that cannot be generated from
within the lower-level account. Even something as simple as a volume of
gas displays “emergent properties” (here, an irreversible tendency toward
equilibrium) that cannot be derived from the collisions between individual
gas molecules (which are symmetric with respect to time).
It seems to be not scientists, but rather publicists of science, who
are haunted by a sense of metaphysical hazard when confronted with

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 THE LIMITS OF NEURO-TALK

phenomena that can’t be fully understood reductively. But how sincere

is this horror? Is it rather a pose struck by such publicists, a histrionic
display intended to cow others into submission? “You’re not a dualist, are
you?” For their part, many humanists aren’t sufficiently acquainted with
the principles of scientific explanation to be able to see that this kind of
bullying is fraudulent in its claim to speak for science, and end up feeling
resentful towards science. This is bad for humanists, and bad for science.

The Histrionics of the Neuro-Metaphysician

A paper recently published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, of all
places, shines a light on the magical, totemic effect of brain scans on those
viewing them. The authors of “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience
Explanations,” a team of Yale scholars, offered their subjects various
explanations for certain psychological phenomena that are familiar to
everyday experience. Some of these explanations were contrived to be
pointedly bad explanations. Their subjects consisted of three groups:
neuroscientists, neuroscience students, and lay adults. The study found
that all three groups did well at identifying the bad explanations as bad,
except when those explanations were preceded with the words, “Brain
scans indicate.” Then the students and lay adults tended to accept the bad
explanation. A complementary set of experiments by David P. McCabe
and Alan D. Castel, currently in press in the journal Cognition, found that
“readers infer more scientific value for articles including brain images
than those that do not, regardless of whether the article included reason-
ing errors or not.”
These findings suggest that we are culturally predisposed to surrender
our own judgment in the face of brain scans. More generally, we defer to
the mere trappings of “science.” This ready alienation of judgment presents
an opportunity for all manner of cultural entrepreneurs who seek, not
quite authority over others, perhaps, but rather to be the oracular source of
such authority, whether in law, policy, psychiatry, or management. There
is no arguing with a picture of a brain. Further, there is a ready market
for the explanations offered by such entrepreneurs. Among those charged
with the administration of human beings, there is a great hunger for sci-
entific-looking accounts that can justify their interventions, as the aura of
science imparts legitimacy to their efforts.
For example, professors of public policy dream of being able to use
brain scans to predict a propensity, not only for violence, but also for ten-
dencies like racial bias, as Jeffrey Rosen reported in the New York Times

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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

Magazine in 2007. This would open a vista of social control previously

only imagined, and expand the dominion of criminologists: if human
behavior is electrochemically preordained, there remains no discernible
ground on which to object to preemptive interventions directed against
those identified as “hard-wired” malfeasants. Such interventions might
take the form of surveillance, incarceration, or alteration (through drugs,
surgery, or implants).
But neurolawyers and neurocriminologists are not exactly neurosci-
entists. The irony is that “we have no evidence whatsoever that activity
in the brain is more predictive of things we care about in the courtroom
than the behaviors that we correlate with brain function,” according to
Elizabeth Phelps, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York University, as
quoted by Rosen. In other words, if you want to predict whether someone
is going to break the law in the future, a picture of his brain is no better
than a record of his past behavior. Indeed it is quite a bit worse, as the
correlation of future behavior with brain abnormalities is weaker than it is
with past behavior. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga writes in his book
The Ethical Brain that “most patients who suffer from . . . lesions involving
the inferior orbital frontal lobe do not exhibit antisocial behavior of the
type that would be noticed by the law.” It is merely that people with such
lesions have a higher incidence of such behavior than those without. So for
the pragmatic purpose of predicting behavior, the story of neurological
causation that is told by pointing to an image of a brain merely adds a layer
of metaphysics, gratuitously inserted between past behavior and future
behavior despite its lack of predictive power.
Rosen quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of social psychiatry and
psychiatric ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying, “I work
for NASA, and imagine how helpful it might be for NASA if it could scan
your brain to discover whether you have a good enough spatial sense to
be a pilot.” But consider: NASA currently tests your spatial reasoning
directly—the intellectual capacity itself, not a neurological correlate of
it. This is done by putting you in a flight simulator and observing your
performance in a pragmatic context similar to the one you would face as
a pilot. But such a pragmatic orientation doesn’t offer the excitement that
comes with accessing a hidden realm of causation.
It may be worth recounting an episode from the history of science
when hidden causes similarly had people excited. In the seventeenth
century, one of the grand problems of science was to explain why things
fall down. Descartes had developed a strictly mechanical, billiard-ball
model wherein imperceptible particles impinging from above push things

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 THE LIMITS OF NEURO-TALK

downward. There were other, competing mechanical models. The prob-

lem was that no such mechanical picture could account for the findings of
Galileo—namely, that bodies fall with a uniformly accelerated motion and
the acceleration for all bodies is identical, regardless of size. This impasse
surrounding what we now call gravity could be resolved by positing a
force of attraction between bodies. Newton did just this, but in doing so
he was attacked by the more doctrinaire “mechanicists,” for whom it was
a matter of principle that there could be no action at a distance. Newton
was accused of re-introducing scholastic “occult qualities” into nature,
precisely the kind of explanation that the mechanical philosophy set out
to banish, just as the current reductionism in psychology wants to banish
spooky notions like “soul.”
While the mechanical philosophy confidently posited hidden mecha-
nisms, on the assumption that there must be some cause that is similar to
the ones we can see operating in the world, Newton was content to leave
causes mysterious. He then proceeded to give a mathematical description of
how bodies move under the mysterious attractive force: the inverse square
law of gravity. Accepting the obscurity of gravity’s causes seems to have
freed Newton up to attend to the phenomena, and thus to accomplish his
mathematization of the phenomena. The intransigently reductive position
adopted by the mechanical philosophers was abandoned. It is worth not-
ing that our understanding of gravity, though transformed by Einstein,
remains agnostic on causes. Instead of spooky action at a distance, now
we have even spookier distortions of space-time. Physicists seem to be less
easily spooked than cognitive scientists.

The Autonomy of the Mental

Where does this leave us? I would like to make the case for giving due
deference to ordinary human experience as the proper guide for under-
standing human beings. Such deference may be contrasted with the
field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work of Paul and Patricia
Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms”—such as “reflec-
tion” and “deliberation”—with terms that describe brain states. Needless
to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective experience
of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide between the
objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not map
neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a
layer of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely
epiphenomenal. For example, if you are told your mother has died, your

WINTER 2008 ~ 77
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 MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

dismayed comprehension of the fact, which is a subjective mental event,

will cause an objective physiological change in your brain.
In light of this causal power of the mental over the physical, we begin
to wonder if it is right to think of these two types of reality as layered,
in the sense that one is more causally effective than the other. It would
follow from this doubt that re-describing our introspective experience of
our own mental life in terms of brain states is optional, in this sense: the
choice of description ought to depend on what you’re trying to explain.
Each description answers to a different sort of “explanatory request,”
issuing from different realms of practice. The “folk” description answers
to the realm of everyday human experience, and the brain description
answers to the realm of physiological investigation.
To insist that the brain description is superior to the mental one in a
more comprehensive way, such that it may subsume the mental one and
render it obsolete, there must be points of contact where the two descrip-
tions conflict, so the better one can show itself as superior. This is what
happened when, for example, the Copernican theory prevailed over the
preceding view that the earth is the center of the universe. The problem
with the neurological re-description of our mental life would seem to be
that there is no such contact, hence no competition. Hence no reason for
preferring one over the other, on any grounds other than pragmatic ones.
There is an explanatory gap between our knowledge of the brain and what
we know first-hand of ourselves, and it is difficult to imagine what kind of
finding would bridge the gap. That there should be a neurological basis for
our mental life is not controversial. But that beginning insight also seems
to exhaust the contribution of brain scans to our self-understanding.
Bracketing the questions of the mind-body problem is unsatisfying.
But such a lack of metaphysical satisfaction may be something we need to
live with. To do so is a form of sobriety, as against the zeal of those who
rush off to reform law, public policy, and ethics as though these ultimate
questions had been settled, and always in such a way as to overturn what
we know first-hand of our own agency.

78 ~ THE NEW ATLANTIS

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