this too has now been challenged on neurophysiological grounds. We comment on the new observations concerning both these phenomena in chapter 17. Finally, there are theories on how the brain supports consciousness based on recent neuroscientific observations that require extensive connective conceptual analysis, such as the Integrated Information Theory of Tononi and the Global Workspace Theory of Dehaene. This analysis is provided in chapter 12.
This is a work of philosophical or conceptual clarification, so we have attempted to keep the technical aspects of neuroscience to a minimum. ( Extensive technical discussions are to be found in our 2008 book History of Cognitive Neuroscience.) But what we have introduced should help sketch the contemporary landscape of that subject, whose actual achievements need clarification.
Second, there was a misunderstanding concerning the subject of the book. Many reviewers and critics thought that the central subject of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience was the mereological fallacy in neuroscience, that is: the mistake of ascribing to the brain – a mere part of the human being, and to parts of the brain – such as the visual striate cortex, the frontal cortices, the amygdala and so forth, psychological, intellectual and volitional attributes which can logically be attributed only to the human being as a whole. This categorial mistake leads to flaws in reasoning, that is: to fallacies. We gave the impression to some reviewers that all 452 pages of the first edition were dedicated to displaying this mistake and refuting this fallacy. But this is to mistake a leitmotif for the opera itself. In the first edition, we dedicated a part of chapter 3 to the matter of ascribing to parts of the brain properties of the organism as a whole. In the new edition we have segregated this into an independent (chapter 3), separating it from a range of further fundamental conceptual entanglements (chapter 4). These include the subjects of self-ascription of experience, of introspection as a form of inner sense, of knowledge of the mental states, events and processes of other people, of privacy and subjectivity, of identity of experiences, of naming and describing experiences and of constitutive evidential grounds. These misunderstandings are not aspects of the mereological fallacy in neuroscience. They are severally and collectively no less important.
It is perfectly true that the mereological principle and the mereological fallacy run like a leitmotif through the book. But that is because this pervasive mistake causes misunderstandings, misinterpretations of the results of experiments and faulty design of experiments. So we could not avoid mentioning it in our conceptual investigations into the forms and structures of human faculties and their exercise. However, our general explanation is to be found in chapter 3 and is now clearly separated from other important conceptual flaws.
Third, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience was and is designed as a handbook for cognitive neuroscientists, a handbook to be consulted before commencing conceptualization and design of experiments on specific human faculties and their exercise. Reviewers and philosophers apart, we do not expect many of our cognitive neuroscientist readers to read through the whole book at successive sittings. For most such readers, this is a reference work, Parts II and III of which are to be consulted chapter by chapter as necessary. ( That is why we have allowed a fair amount of overlap and some repetition, so that each chapter should be reasonably self-contained.) The chapters in Part II cover the themes of sensation; perception; knowledge; memory; belief; thinking; mental imagery; perturbations, agitations and emotions; voluntary movement, voluntary, purposive and intentional action; executive control; automatic and mechanical behaviour. Part III is concerned with a battery of topics linked with consciousness, and has little to add on mereological errors. Its purpose is to shed light on a wide range of themes that preoccupy contemporary neuroscientists: on intransitive and transitive consciousness, on perceptual consciousness and consciousness of facts, on self-consciousness in its manifold forms and on qualia or the so-called qualitative character of experience.
Fourth, many neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists may be puzzled why philosophical analysis of salient concepts should have any relevance to the experimental neuroscientist. Some think that philosophy is now obsolete, that the great problems of philosophy over the last two and a half thousand years are destined to be resolved by study of the brain. Neuroscience, many believe, is solving the venerable problem of free will – showing experimentally that freedom of action is a delusion produced by the brain. Similarly, it is widely believed that the cognitive neuroscience of perception proves that perceptual qualities, such as sound and colour, do not exist in the ‘external world’, but are fictions produced by the brain, in the brain. Others demonstrate to their satisfaction that memories are stored in the brain at synaptic connections or cells – a modern variant of engrams. American neuroscientists commonly appeal to the 1890s work of William James as the still unsurpassed work of psychology and cognitive science. As we show, James’ s book The Principles of Psychology is a goldmine of conceptual confusions, from which much can be learned.
One reason for the widespread belief that philosophy is obsolete is that, with a history of more than two thousand years, philosophers are still alleged to be arguing over the same old problems that preoccupied Plato and Aristotle. But this is both an exaggeration and a misunderstanding. It is an exaggeration in as much as there are numerous philosophical questions that do not and could not appear in the works of Plato and Aristotle, such as the nature of alternative geometries, the post-Einsteinian puzzles about space-time, the differences between the voluntary and the intentional. It is a misunderstanding in as much as neuroscientists do not realise why so many of the deepest problems of philosophy have to crop up, in slightly different forms, every generation and have to be tackled de novo by each generation. This we try to explain by reference to the fact that the potentiality for conceptual confusion is buried deep in our language. Such confusions can be eliminated for a few decades by painstaking conceptual analysis. But they will rise again, as younger generations fall into the same traps. Sense data died under critical onslaught in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the end of the century internal representations arose phoenixlike from their ashes.
Numerous scientists find puzzling the thought that a priori reflection can have any bearing on experimental science, and that experimental science, while it can present new conceptual problems for connective analysis, cannot show logico-grammatical analyses to be mistaken. It is surely impossible that a few minutes’ armchair reflection on the use of a couple of words in English should be able to trump painstaking experiments of the greatest sophistication, using instruments that probe the functioning of the brain, that are successfully repeated all over the world. It seems equally baffling to suggest that a well-constructed neuroscientific experiment should not be able to prove false the grammatical conventions of a prescientific language concerned with perception, thought, affection and will in all their forms. Logico-grammatical analysis investigates mere words, but neuroscientists are concerned with reality. Cartesian dualism, it is argued, was shown to be false by the discovery of the law of conservation of momentum. That an immaterial substance might affect the total quantity of momentum would violate the laws of physics.
This is mistaken. Cartesian dualism is not shown to be false by the advance of science, for science can show something to be false only if it makes sense. If it makes sense then it is intelligible that it be true even though it happens not to be. If the Cartesian mind were able to change the direction of motion of the body by acting on the pineal gland, then the so called system of the physical universe would not be closed, as philosophers of science commonly suppose it to be, and the Law of Conservation of Momentum would be false. But
