The Prospects for Neuro-Exceptionalism: Transparent Lies, Naked Minds

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I owe thanks to David Wasserman for valuable comments on an earlier draft. Work on this article was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health MH073685 and from a grant from the National Institutes of Health HG003299.

Notes

¹ It should be clear that no assumption is being made in this example that low serotonin levels (or the 5-HTT allele) is either necessary or sufficient for depression.

² This argument is of course open to objections. Rather than being distinct from the affective symptoms, the cortical activity might be an intermediate causal step between the affective response and the bodily expression.

³ The issue I raise here is not the problem of interpretation noted by Illes and Racine (2005), which concerns more the technical difficulties in discerning meaningful patterns in the data. The translation problem remains even if these other epistemological problems are adequately addressed.