ascription of psychological attributes to the brain is figurative or metaphorical, since they know perfectly well that the brain does not think or use maps
Finally, it might be argued that neuroscientists do not really think that the brain reasons, argues, asks and answers questions just as we do. They do not really believe that the brain interprets clues, makes guesses or contains symbols which describe the outside world. And although they talk of there being ‘maps’ in the brain and of the brain’ s containing ‘internal representations’, they are not using these words in their common or vulgar sense. This is figurative and metaphorical speech – sometimes even poetic licence.21 Neuroscientists, therefore, are not in the least misled by such ways of speaking –– they know perfectly well what they mean, but lack the words to say it save metaphorically or figuratively.
Fourth objection (Searle):the brain is not a part of a person, so ascribing psychological attributes to the brain is not a mereological fallacy at all
At the American Philosophical Association meeting (APA) in New York 2005 in an authors and critics session, John Searle argued that what we deem to be a mereological fallacy (of ascribing psychological attributes to part of a person) is in fact no such thing, because the brain is not a part of a person, but rather a part of a person’ s body.22 This is a red herring, since Aristotle, George Henry Lewes and Wittgenstein, whom we are explicitly following, did not invoke the category of person when they advanced their views on attributability (see above p. 82, especially footnote 13). It is true that we often switched from talk of human beings to talk of persons, and it can indeed be misleading. In this second edition we have minimized talk of persons in order to minimize misunderstanding, although, as we shall show, nothing turns on the matter when it comes to neuroscientists’ misascription of psychological properties to the brain.
Fifth objection (Dennett): the distinction that we present is no more than the distinction between mechanical and non-mechanical properties
At the same APA meeting, Daniel Dennett suggested that what we characterized as a mereological fallacy is in fact no more than a distinction (which he drew in 1969) between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation.23 According to Dennett being in pain is not a property of the brain, for pains are ‘mental phenomena’ that are ‘non-mechanical’, whereas cerebral processes are ‘essentially mechanical’. However, as we shall see, this is both misguided and misdirected.
3.4 Replies to Objections
Reply to Ullman’s objection that neuroscientists are using the psychological vocabulary in a special technical sense
With regard to the misuse of the psychological vocabulary involved in ascribing psychological predicates to the brain, all the evidence points to the fact that neuroscientists are not using these terms in a special sense. Far from being new homonyms, the psychological expressions they use are being invoked in their customary sense, otherwise the neuroscientists would not draw the inferences from them which they do draw. When Crick asserts that ‘what you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there’, it is important that he takes ‘believes’ to have its normal connotations – that it does not mean the same as some novel term ‘believes*’. For it is part of Crick’ s tale that the belief is the outcome of an interpretation based on previous experience and information (and not the outcome of an interpretation* based on previous experience* and information*). When Semir Zeki remarks that the acquisition of knowledge is a ‘primordial function of the brain’,24 he means knowledge, not knowledge* – otherwise he would not think that it is the task of future neuroscience to solve the problems of epistemology (but only, presumably, of epistemology*). Similarly, when Young talks of the brain’ s containing knowledge and information, which is encoded in the brain ‘just as knowledge can be recorded in books or computers’,25 he means knowledge, not knowledge* – since it is knowledge and information, not knowledge* and information*, that can be recorded in books and computers. When Milner, Squire and Kandel talk of ‘declarative memory’, they explain that this phrase signifies ‘what is ordinarily meant by the term “memory”’,26 but then go on to declare that such memories, not memories*, are ‘stored in the brain’. That presupposes that it makes sense to speak of storing memories (in the ordinary sense of the word) in the brain (for detailed discussion of this questionable claim, see §6.2.2 below).
Reply to Ullman: David Marr on ‘representations’
The accusation of committing the mereological fallacy cannot be that easily rebutted. But Simon Ullman may appear to be on stronger grounds when it comes to talk of internal representations and symbolic representations (as well as maps) in the brain. If ‘representation’ does not mean what it ordinarily does, if ‘symbolic’ has nothing to do with symbols, then it may indeed be innocuous to speak of there being internal, symbolic representations in the brain. (And if ‘maps’ have nothing to do with atlases, but only with mappings, then it may also be innocuous to speak of there being maps in the brain.) It is extraordinarily ill advised to multiply homonyms, but it need involve no conceptual incoherence, as long as the scientists who use these terms thus do not forget that the terms do not have their customary meaning. Unfortunately, they typically do forget this and proceed to cross the new use with the old, generating incoherence. Ullman, defending Marr, insists (perfectly correctly) that certain brain events can be viewed as representations* of depth or orientation or reflectance;27 that is, that one can correlate certain neural firings with features in the visual field (denominating the former ‘representations*’ of the latter). But it is evident that this is not all that Marr meant. He claimed that numeral systems (roman or arabic numerals, binary notation) are representations. However, such notations have nothing to do with causal correlations, but with representational conventions. He claimed that ‘a representation for shape would be a formal scheme for describing some aspects of shape, together with rules that specify how the scheme is applied to any particular shape’,28 that a formal scheme is ‘a set of symbols with rules for putting them together’,29 and that ‘a representation, therefore, is not a foreign idea at all – we all use representations all the time. However, the notion that one can capture some aspect of reality by making a description of it using a symbol and that to do so can be useful seems to me to be a powerful and fascinating idea.’30 But the sense in which we ‘use representations all the time’, in which representations are rule-governed symbols, and in which they are used for describing things, is the semantic sense of ‘representation’ – not a new homonymical causal sense. Marr has fallen into a trap of his own making.31 He in effect conflates Ullman’s representations*, which are causal correlates, with linguistic representations, which are symbols or symbol systems with a syntax and meaning determined by conventions.
Reply to Ullman: Young on ‘maps’ and Frisby on ‘symbolic representations’
Similarly, it would be misleading, but otherwise innocuous, to speak of maps in the brain when what is meant is that certain features of the visual field can be mapped on to the firings of groups of cells in the ‘visual’ striate cortex. But then one cannot go on to say, as Young does, that the brain makes use of its maps in formulating its hypotheses about what is visible. So, too, it would be innocuous to speak of there being symbolic representations in the brain, as long as ‘symbolic’ has nothing to do with semantic meaning, but signifies only ‘natural meaning’ (as in ‘smoke means fire’). But then one cannot go on to say, as Frisby does, that ‘there must be a symbolic description in the brain of the outside world, a description cast in symbols which stand for the various aspects of the world of which sight makes us aware’.32 For this use of ‘symbol’ is evidently semantic. For while smoke means fire, inasmuch as it is a sign of fire (an inductively correlated indication), it is not a sign for fire. Smoke rising from a distant hillside is not a description of fire cast in symbols, and the firing of neurons in the ‘visual’
