As physiological psychology research techniques continue to improve (e.g., improved brain imaging), will that make past (e.g.,Husserl) and 21th century philosophers of mind more or less relevant?

-- Paul R. Kleinginna (prklein@gsvms2.cc.gasou.edu), October 27, 2002

Answers

I'd say more relevant. Brain never adequately "explains" mind. I have, for example, had various images taken of my brain after an auto accident. I can show you an MRI, a SPECT scan, EEG patterns, etc. and still not show you a single thought. You can describe my mental activity in detail, but you will not have captured any of the essence of my person, my uniqueness. It seems to me that the more we know about the brain, the more complex the question of how brain becomes mind.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), October 28, 2002.

I agree that new brain imaging techniques and other brain or body measures dealing with thought, emotion, and motivation will give us new things to explain or help us answer some of our old questions about the mind. People of various backgrounds and time periods will make contributions to our understanding of the mind and brain, but the area of philosophy of the mind is an old and still active area of philosophy, that I expect will make many important contributions. There are other areas of philosophy that will also be relevant (e.g., dealing with degree of certainty, consistency, or morality).

-- Paul Kleinginna (prklein@gsvms2.cc.gasou.edu), October 28, 2002.

This is an interesting question: it seems to suggest that there is a criterion that could distinguish “hard facts” from philosophical perspectives. But the notion of separating facts from values was itself a philosophy (Logical Empericism). It died upon the failure to devise a criterion that separates facts from values. In that way, the belief that physiology could eliminate judgment and valuation in science is itself philosophy.

I do endorse the identity theory, the view that the mind and brain are the same thing seen from different perspectives. But that doesn’t mean that brain scans and so on will be exceedingly revelatory. They could be similar to “listening” to music by turning the sound down and watching the lights on the graphic equalizer showing volume fluctuations at specific frequencies. In this way I can ‘measure’ the music. But what would that prove? I’d rather listen to the music…Those my values, however…

Psychology is a human science. It’s reason for being is to understand consciousness. It is studying a function and phenomena that is *unprecedented* in prior evolution. Consequently I believe psychology should focus on devising methods that are *unprecedented* in science. There seems to be no reason why methods appropriate for studying inanimate phenomena are the only methods for all phenomena. Much is made of psychology breaking free of philosophy. All that means is psychology got its own department in universities. It doesn’t mean psychology became free of judgment and values. It is a very serious mistake for psychology to think that valuing natural scientific methods and perspective is “value free”.

I also believe that conscious experience is an irreducible emergent function. In that case the meaning of dehumanization is the attempt to reduce sentience to a prior level of evolution, namely, pure biotic life, or worse, inanimate nature.

The rival belief, that consciousness is reducible to biotic life, or even inanimate material contributes to the justification of psychology emulating natural science.

The irreducible – reducible debate (if there is one,) is what I call the problem of objectivity in psychology. The problem isn’t how to get value free facts. The problem is, “What is the object psychology studies?” Clearly, if one believes that sentience is reducible to pre sentient evolutionary structures, the object psychology studies *is not sentience*. But if consciousness is irreducible, then the object psychology studies is sentience itself.

The irreducible – reducible debate represent two differing philosophical perspectives in psychology. Unfortunately the reducible side was mistakenly seen as objective and value free. The “objective, value free” adjectives constituted an unctitical acceptance of the philosophy that sentient structures and functions could be understood in terms of methods designed to understand pre- sentient evolutionary structures.

Given my (unproven) perspective along side a formidable (unproven) rival perspective where do I turn? To phenomenological psychology, to Amedio Giorgi’s Psychology as a Human Science, to a psychology rooted in Merleu Ponty, Heidegger, and Husserl. Husserl’s wrote, “To the things themselves”. What does that mean? It means he wanted the general structure of an *intact* entity. And Giorgi devised a way to obtain the general structure of human experiences that reveals a flow of experience in non-natural scientific terms and retains the person as *whole and integrated*. In contrast, factor analysis, for instance, see humans in natural scientific terms. For example, a specific set of factors (in me) causes me to do such and such. Now there are *two* of “me”. The “me” that is the factors, and the “me” that is caused by the factors. In that case the integrated whole “thing itself” that Husserl was interested in is lost in a bipartite cause and effect view of the person. Are there really two persons in each person as factor analysis suggests? I suspect that source of the ‘cause person’ and the ‘effect person’ within one person is the preconceived idea that psychology should be like the area of physics called mechanics. That preconceived idea is a *value* not a fact. It’s philosophy.

I see philosophy permeating all of psychology. And philosophy becomes even more important when we incorrectly imagine that the paradigm we work in is value free. In that case we become instruments of an ideology.

-- John Hedlin (jhedlin@shaw.ca), November 01, 2002.