Neglect and philosophy

Abstract

It is a mistake, in my view, to try to unify the wide variety of phenomena classified as manifestations of “neglect”, by appeal to a single diagnostic or explanatory model of the neglect deficit. There is no such thing. What we have here instead is a cluster of disorders interestingly grouped together by their shared spatial constraints. The unity, if any, lies in the spatial aspect of our intuitive characterisation of individual disorders, rather than anything more fundamental or genuinely explanatory. In particular, the traditional debate between mutually exclusive and supposedly exhaustive attentional and representational interpretations of neglect is a dead end. This is now a fairly familiar view within the neuropsychological community; but my reasons for it are broadly philosophical rather than experimental. Recognising the heterogeneity of neglect is also liberating and productive, not a disappointment or failure, in the project of understanding the nature of normal and abnormal spatial cognition.