As a psychologist with philosophical leanings, I'm particularly pleased to see Valerie Hardcastle's response to Sutherland on the issue of the relative responsibilities and methods of scientists and philosophers:
(1) I hope Keith Sutherland wasn't intending to tar me with the same brush as Metzinger when he wrote, "It's a pleasing observation on the multidisciplinary nature of consciousness studies that a technical symposium like the ASSC Newman thread should include no less than three commentaries by philosophers (Flanagan, Hardcastle, Metzinger), but are they playing by the same rules as the laboratory workers?" That is, I sincerely intend to play by the same rules as laboratory workers, and if I am not, then I expect to be called on it. In other words, I don't buy Metzinger's distinction between "conceptual" and "empirical" theories. All theories, to me, are both.
Still, it seems to me that each discipline can most productively engage in interdisciplinary contact if the constraints we place on each other are not too rigid. Thus, because most philosophers feel comfortable extrapolating from a few bits of especially intriguing data, eg on binding, we should not restrain their 'conceptual' work, by pointing to the speculative and empirically unsupported nature of their 'metaphysical' position. Likewise, philosophers should be more patient with the conceptual inconsistency and incoherence of ideas of scientists, as they generate relatively narrow theories to account for their data, put provide a broad sweep of empirical results to which they apply those theories.
Thus, I don't entirely agree with Hardcastle's second point, which stresses 'naturalism' in theorizing. As she herself points out with respect to Einstein, today's 'non-natural' speculations may become tomorrow's nature. In the 17th and 18th century, and well into the 19th, it seemed that the mind must control brain activity via a mind/brain locus such as the pineal gland. The notion of a unified mind distributed across a brain seemed conceptually incoherent. But now with an empirical solution to the 'binding problem' finally in our grasp, the possibility of 'unity of consciousness' in a spatial distributed brain, suddenly seems not nearly so incoherent. Descartes himself might bite.
John Barresi
JBARRESI@AC.DAL.CA
jcs-online
menu