•  29
    An opinionated history of neuroscience, which argues that--due to the brain's complexity--neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths, and therefore "neurophilosophy" is unlikely to be achieved.
  •  15
    The victory of realism over idealism at the start of the twentieth century, and of scientific realism over logical empiricism and pragmatism in the mid twentieth century, is a striking phenomenon that calls for historical explanation. In this paper I propose an externalist account, looking at the social and political reasons why realism became attractive, rather than considering the internal factors–the merits of the arguments in favour of realism. I look at the agenda of Roy Wood Sellars’ criti…Read more
  •  36
    Haptic realism for neuroscience
    Synthese 202 (3): 1-16. 2023.
    Recent work in philosophy of science has shown how the challenges posed by extremely complex systems require that scientists employ a range of modelling strategies, leading to partial perspectives that make apparently conflicting claims about the target (Mitchell 2009b, Longino 2013). The brain is of course extremely complex, and the same arguments apply here. In this paper I present a variety of perspectivism called _haptic realism_. This account foregrounds the process by which the instrumenta…Read more
  •  19
    Synthesis of contraries: Hughlings Jackson on sensory-motor representation in the brain
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 75 34-44. 2019.
  •  11
    This chapter surveys Ernst CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s responses to the vitalist and holist/organicist movements in biology during the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that examination of the combination of CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s enthusiasm for holism, and rejection of vitalism, puts into relief many themes and preoccupations that are consistent across CassirerCassirer, Ernst’s philosophical career, and aids the interpretation of his philosophy of symbolic forms. I propose that i…Read more
  •  38
    X—Disjunctivism and Cartesian Idealization
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 122 (3): 218-238. 2022.
    This paper examines the dispute between Burge and McDowell over methodology in the philosophy of perception. Burge (2005, 2011) has argued that the disjunctivism posited by naive perceptual realists is incompatible with the results of current perceptual science, while McDowell (2010, 2013) defends his disjunctivism by claiming an autonomous field of enquiry for perceptual epistemology, one that does not employ the classificatory schemes of the science. Here it is argued that the crucial point at…Read more
  •  39
    This paper takes an integrated history and philosophy of science approach to the topic of "simplicity out of complexity". The reflex theory was a framework within early twentieth century psychology and neuroscience which aimed to decompose complex behaviours and neural responses into simple reflexes. It was controversial in its time, and did not live up to its own theoretical and empirical ambitions. Examination of this episode poses important questions about the limitations of simplifying strat…Read more
  •  42
    Cassirer and Goldstein on Abstraction and the Autonomy of Biology
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (2): 471-503. 2020.
    This article examines the mutual influence between Ernst Cassirer and his cousin, the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. For both Cassirer and Goldstein, views on the nature of human cognition were fundamental to their understanding of scientific knowledge, and these were informed by both philosophical theorizing and empirical research on pathologies of the nervous system. Following Cassirer, and in agreement with the physicalism of the Vienna Circle, Goldstein held that the physical sciences had progr…Read more
  •  86
    Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the readi…Read more
  •  89
    The use of machine learning instead of traditional models in neuroscience raises significant questions about the epistemic benefits of the newer methods. I draw on the literature on model intelligibility in the philosophy of science to offer some benchmarks for the interpretability of artificial neural networks used as a predictive tool in neuroscience. Following two case studies on the use of ANN’s to model motor cortex and the visual system, I argue that the benefit of providing the scientist …Read more
  •  86
    Philosophy Compass, EarlyView.
  •  131
  •  43
    In this article, I discuss the concept of robustness in neuroscience. Various mechanisms for making systems robust have been discussed across biology and neuroscience. Many of these notions originate from engineering. I argue that concepts borrowed from engineering aid neuroscientists in operationalizing robustness, formulating hypotheses about mechanisms for robustness, and quantifying robustness. Furthermore, I argue that the significant disanalogies between brains and engineered artifacts rai…Read more
  •  26
    John Hughlings Jackson is a major figure at the origins of neurology and neuroscience in Britain. Alongside his contributions to clinical medicine, he left a large corpus of writing on localisation of function in the nervous system and other theoretical topics. In this paper I focus on Jackson’s “doctrine of concomitance”—his parallelist theory of the mind-brain relationship. I argue that the doctrine can be given both an ontological and a causal interpretation, and that the causal aspect of the…Read more
  •  43
    Vision, Perspctivism, and Haptic Realism
    Philosophy of Science 83 (5): 746-756. 2016.
    In this article I examine the perceptual metaphor at the heart of perspectivism, discussing three elements: partiality, interestedness, and interaction. I argue that perspectivists should drop the visual metaphor in favor of a haptic one. Because the sense of touch requires contact and purposeful exploration on the part of the perceiver, it is obvious that with touch one apprehends an extradermal reality in virtue of and not in spite of its interactive and interested nature. By analogy, perspect…Read more
  •  26
    Replies
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (1): 244-255. 2017.
  •  40
    Précis of Outside Color
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (1): 215-222. 2017.
  •  57
    Is color real or illusory, mind independent or mind dependent? Does seeing in color give us a true picture of external reality? The metaphysical debate over color has gone on at least since the seventeenth century. In this book, M. Chirimuuta draws on contemporary perceptual science to address these questions. Her account integrates historical philosophical debates, contemporary work in the philosophy of color, and recent findings in neuroscience and vision science to propose a novel theory of t…Read more
  •  77
    The Uses of Colour Vision: Ornamental, Practical, and Theoretical
    with F. A. A. Kingdom
    Minds and Machines 25 (2): 213-229. 2015.
    What is colour vision for? In the popular imagination colour vision is for “seeing the colours” — adding hue to the achromatic world of shape, depth and motion. On this view colour vision plays little more than an ornamental role, lending glamour to an otherwise monochrome world. This idea has guided much theorising about colour within vision science and philosophy. However, we argue that a broader approach is needed. Recent research in the psychology of colour demonstrates that colour vision is…Read more
  •  141
    Psychophysical Methods and the Evasion of Introspection
    Philosophy of Science 81 (5): 914-926. 2014.
    While introspective methods went out of favour with the decline of Titchener’s analytic school, many important questions concern the rehabilitation of introspection in contemporary psychology. Hatfield rightly points out that introspective methods should not be confused with analytic ones, and goes on to describe their “ineliminable role” in perceptual psychology. Here I argue that certain methodological conventions within psychophysics reflect a continued uncertainty over appropriate use of sub…Read more
  •  1345
    The concept of the receptive field, first articulated by Hartline, is central to visual neuroscience. The receptive field of a neuron encompasses the spatial and temporal properties of stimuli that activate the neuron, and, as Hubel and Wiesel conceived of it, a neuron’s receptive field is static. This makes it possible to build models of neural circuits and to build up more complex receptive fields out of simpler ones. Recent work in visual neurophysiology is providing evidence that the classic…Read more
  •  202
    Explanation in Computational Neuroscience: Causal and Non-causal
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (3): 849-880. 2018.
    This article examines three candidate cases of non-causal explanation in computational neuroscience. I argue that there are instances of efficient coding explanation that are strongly analogous to examples of non-causal explanation in physics and biology, as presented by Batterman, Woodward, and Lange. By integrating Lange’s and Woodward’s accounts, I offer a new way to elucidate the distinction between causal and non-causal explanation, and to address concerns about the explanatory sufficiency …Read more
  •  40
    Why the “stimulus-error” did not go away
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 56 33-42. 2016.
  •  40
    Perceptual Pragmatism and the Naturalized Ontology of Color
    Topics in Cognitive Science 8 (4). 2016.
    This paper considers whether there can be any such thing as a naturalized metaphysics of color—any distillation of the commitments of perceptual science with regard to color ontology. I first make some observations about the kinds of philosophical commitments that sometimes bubble to the surface in the psychology and neuroscience of color. Unsurprisingly, because of the range of opinions expressed, an ontology of color cannot simply be read off from scientists’ definitions and theoretical statem…Read more
  •  647
    Extending, changing, and explaining the brain
    Biology and Philosophy 28 (4): 613-638. 2013.
    This paper addresses concerns raised recently by Datteri (Biol Philos 24:301–324, 2009) and Craver (Philos Sci 77(5):840–851, 2010) about the use of brain-extending prosthetics in experimental neuroscience. Since the operation of the implant induces plastic changes in neural circuits, it is reasonable to worry that operational knowledge of the hybrid system will not be an accurate basis for generalisation when modelling the unextended brain. I argue, however, that Datteri’s no-plasticity constra…Read more
  •  41
    The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (3): 339-342. 2010.
    This Article does not have an abstract