Intentional concepts in cognitive neuroscience

Abstract

In this article, I develop an account of the use of intentional predicates in cognitive neuroscience explanations. As pointed out by Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, intentional language abounds in neuroscience theories. According to Bennett and Hacker, the subpersonal use of intentional predicates results in conceptual confusion. I argue against this overly strong conclusion by evaluating the contested language use in light of its explanatory function. By employing conceptual resources from the contemporary philosophy of science, I show that although the use of intentional predicates in mechanistic explanations sometimes leads to explanatorily inert claims, intentional predicates can also successfully feature in mechanistic explanations as tools for the functional analysis of the explanandum phenomenon. Despite the similarities between my account and Daniel Dennett's intentional-stance approach, I argue that intentional stance should not be understood as a theory of subpersonal causal explanation, and therefore cannot be used to assess the explanatory role of intentional predicates in neuroscience. Finally, I outline a general strategy for answering the question of what kind of language can be employed in mechanistic explanations.

Keywords:

• cognitive neuroscience
• explanation
• mechanism
• intentionality

Acknowledgements

An early draft of the article was presented at the ESPP 2010 meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (Bochum, August 2010). I thank the audience of this event as well as the philosophy of science group and members of the ‘A science of the soul’ project at the University of Helsinki for their helpful comments. In particular, I am grateful to Olle Blomberg, Andy Clark, Jaakko Kuorikoski, Lisa Muszynski, Uskali Mäki, Petri Ylikoski and the two anonymous referees for this journal for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes on contributor

Samuli Pöyhönen is a doctoral candidate in the Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. His field of research is the philosophy of the science, and his research interests include explanation, classification and conceptual change in the human sciences, particularly in interdisciplinary contexts.

Notes

1. B&H claim that, among several others, the work researchers such as Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Richard Gregory, Eric Kandel and David Marr build on conceptually confused foundations.

2. B&H are not the first ones to present this criticism of scientific psychology. They often quote Wittgenstein's dictum, according to which only human beings could meaningfully be said to sense, see, hear or to be conscious (Wittgenstein 1958, Section 281; see also Kenny 1971; Chisholm 1991).

3. The functional analysis approach (Cummins 1983) goes also by several other names such as ‘the systems tradition’ (Craver 2007) and ‘heuristics of decomposition and localization’ (Bechtel and Richardson 1993). Despite their differences, these views have enough in common to allow common exposition.

4. This is a highly simplified picture of the explanatory process. In real research, stages 1–3 do not need to temporally follow each other. Resulting from bottom-up research strategies, the mechanistic decomposition (stage 3) often considerably influences the identification of the explanandum phenomenon and its functional decomposition (cf. Bechtel 2008a). Nor is this characterization meant to suggest that a convenient form-function correlation between the material structure and the functional decomposition could always be found; often evolved cognitive systems show breakdowns of clear modularity required by neat form-function correspondence.

5. This ‘well-informed guessing’ is of course only one use of the term, and there are several others. Guessing under conditions of complete ignorance, such as choosing Lotto numbers, would be one such alternative meaning for the word.

6. Except, or course, in describing psychological explanandum phenomena (Clark 1989, 50–52).

7. For examples of the difficulty of finding the correct functional descriptions of single-cell functioning, see Uithol et al.’s (2011) discussion of the mirror neuron system.

8. For an ambitious agenda for banishing the homunculus from theoretical vision research, see Barlow 1995.