The claim that mind is an epiphenomenon of the nervous system became academically respectable during the 19th century. The same period saw the establishment of an ideal of science as institutionalized endeavour conducted in laboratories. This article identifies three ways in which the ‘physiological psychology’ movement in Britain contributed to the latter process: first, via an appeal to the authority of difficult-to-access sites in the analysis of nerves; second, through the constitution of a discourse internal to it that privileged epistemology (...) over ontology; and third, in its articulation of a set of rhetorical tools that identified laboratories as economically productive institutions. Acknowledging the integral place of physiological psychology in the institution of science, it is claimed, has the potential to alter our understanding of the significance of current neurological science for historical scholarship. (shrink)

Today, neuroscience is undoubtedly at the focus of close public attention and interest. It is associated with the greatest hopes, but also arouses the innermost fears. Neuroscience has become a challenge not only for practical fields such as medicine or pharmacology but for all of the human sciences. Representatives of leading trends in social sciences and humanities have entered the discussion about the possible benefits and threats related to the rapid growth of knowledge in neuroscience. The neuro-turn has become a (...) conceptual framework in which the neuro-centric style of thinking sets the regimen of truth. The article presents a cartography of the space of epistemological solutions proposed by social theory and philosophy in response to the active expansion of neuroscience. Above all, the article explicates the internal mechanics of the critical program - which is based on the logic of "strong explanation" - symmetrically implemented both by critical social theory and neuroscientists. Within the framework of post-critical approaches making a case for replacing the logic of exposure with other epistemological strategies, alternatives to "barbaric criticism" in sociology and philosophy are proposed. In particular, we consider Wittgensteinian sociology which implements a methodology of clarification of the conceptual confusions that arise in neuroscience studies, as well as B. Latour's actor-network theory and K. Barad's agential realism proposing to abandon, on principled grounds, basic binary oppositions such as culture/nature, social/biological, and cerebral/symbolic in favour of the notions of "network" and "onto-epistemological entanglement". (shrink)

This article is an account of the dynamics of interaction across the social sciences and neurosciences. Against an arid rhetoric of ‘interdisciplinarity’, it calls for a more expansive imaginary of what experiment – as practice and ethos – might offer in this space. Arguing that opportunities for collaboration between social scientists and neuroscientists need to be taken seriously, the article situates itself against existing conceptualizations of these dynamics, grouping them under three rubrics: ‘critique’, ‘ebullience’ and ‘interaction’. Despite their differences, each (...) insists on a distinction between sociocultural and neurobiological knowledge, or does not show how a more entangled field might be realized. The article links this absence to the ‘regime of the inter-’, an ethic of interdisciplinarity that guides interaction between disciplines on the understanding of their pre-existing separateness. The argument of the paper is thus twofold: (1) that, contra the ‘regime of the inter-’, it is no longer practicable to maintain a hygienic separation between sociocultural webs and neurobiological architecture; (2) that the cognitive neuroscientific experiment, as a space of epistemological and ontological excess, offers an opportunity to researchers, from all disciplines, to explore and register this realization. (shrink)