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Ethics

: Neuroethics and Law

Neuroreductionism: not dead yet (Reiner)

By Peter Reiner

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Daniel and I have been having a vigorous and healthy discussion behind the scenes about neuroreductionism, and his post on Pardo & Patterson's Philosophical Foundations of Law & Neuroscience has been an excellent opportunity for each of us to sharpen our thinking. Because the discussion is important, I have chosen to write a new post on the same topic, lest it get buried in the comments section.

The P&P paper is essentially an application of the idea that we neuroscientists regularly commit a mereological fallacy, this time applied to thinking about the law. The notion was outlined in by Bennett & Hacker in their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, and is an important philosophical debate which is worthy of discussion. As someone deeply steeped in the reductionist paradigm of neuroscience, I naturally find the mereological fallacy disturbing; if true, it would force me to rethink many of my most cherished ideas about the relationship between brain, mind, and behavior.

That being said, one of the benefits of being a seasoned scientist is that I am comfortable with the notion that my view of any particular issue might be wrong. As with most scientists, I can be swayed in one of two ways: either by unimpeachable logic or by strong evidence. For me, the P&P paper did neither.

In reprising Bennett & Hacker's arguments on the mereological fallacy, P&P provide a suitable outline but the logic is hardly unimpeachable. To use but one example that stands out to a reductive neurobiologist such as myself, they state:

The upshot of this and countless other examples is that psychological attributes
are essentially manifested on the behavior, reactions and responses of the living human
being in the stream of life, not in whatever concomitant neural activity of his brain is to
be found. This is the key to the mereological fallacy and the undoing of the reductive
impulses of neurolegalists. Behavior is something only a human being can engage in.
Brain functions and activities are not behaviors (and persons are not their brains). Yes, it
is necessary that one have a brain in order to engage in behavior.71 But the reduction of a
psychological attribute to a cortical attribute is a fallacious move from whole to part.

I have outlined the problematic sentence in red: to my way of thinking, and, I suspect to philosophers as well, behavior is something that many species engage in (as I have stated to Daniel in our email correspondence, the behavior of a Paramecium is an interesting place to start this debate). This might be construed as a minor quibble, and easily dispensed with, but if the point of the paper is to convince individuals such as myself that the mereological fallacy holds true, the logic needs to be unimpeachable.

Be that as it may, I yield to the notion that there may be more cogent presentations of the mereological fallacy that would be convincing to a reductionist such as myself, and look forward to philosophers wordsmithing their language in such a manner that an important concept such as this will ring true in my circles. We are not there yet.

As for the examples cited by P&P, I am sorry to report that they represent an impoverished view of reductionist neurobiology. In using lie detection, voluntary action and mental states, neuroeconomics, and moral decision making as areas of inquiry in which scientists step into the gooey mud of mereological fallacy, P&P choose poorly. It is hard to imagine conclusions that are more contentious within the reductionist neuroscience community than these, and those critiques do not require one to have even heard of the mereological fallacy. In short, these are areas of inquiry which are either very new and therefore not yet mature, or in which authors have made claims that far outstrip the data. At times, both have occurred. It is not that the science is weak (although sometimes it is), but rather that it is far too early to connect the dots in a manner that neuroscientists find more than provisional. By basing their arguments on such observations, P&P fail on my requirement for strong evidence.

Let me be clear: it is not the case that I do not anticipate that more mature explanations of these phenomena may come with time; Rather, it feels as if P&P have cherry-picked some of the weakest links in the field on which to build their arguments. Such a crumbly foundation will not convince the skeptical rabble of reductionist neuroscientists.

Daniel asserts that P&P intended this paper "is intended as a radical challenge to some of the bedrock assumptions of contemporary neuroscience". I laud their intentions, and remain open to further argument, but for the reasons outlined above, remain unconvinced.

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on February 13, 2009 (boomark / email).