Driven by an appreciation of the field’s early stage of development, I apply the concept of exploratory experimentation, originally put forward in the late 90s philosophy of biology, to current research in cognitive neuroscience. I concentrate on functional magnetic resonance imaging and how this wide-spread technique is used, from experimental design to data analysis. I claim that, although subject to certain significant modifications with respect to the concept’s original rendering, the exploratory character of neuroimaging experiments can be appreciated considering their (...) goals, centered on the stabilization of experimental systems for phenomenological description, and the relevance of their methodological facet. Although I do not claim that there is a specific kind of experiment that one can single out as definitely exploratory, exploration can be seen as a general trait imbuing fMRI-based experimentation. (shrink)

One important strategy for dealing with error in our methods is triangulation, or the use multiple methods to investigate the same object. Current accounts of triangulation assume that its primary function is to provide a confirmatory boost to hypotheses beyond what confirmation of each method alone could produce. Yet, researchers often use multiple methods to examine new constructs about which they are uncertain. For example, social psychologists use multiple indirect measures to provide convergent evidence about implicit attitudes, but how to (...) characterize implicit attitudes is an open question. To make sense of triangulation under uncertainty about constructs, I suggest two changes: first, triangulation can serve multiple epistemic functions, including some that are non-confirmatory, and second, researchers should assess the epistemic risk in claims about evidence and the acceptance/rejection of hypotheses. (shrink)

In this article, I show the role that the philosopher of cognitive science can cur-rently play in cognitive science research. I argue for the important, and not yet considered, role of the philosophy of cognitive science in cognitive science, that is, the importance of cooperation between philosophers of science with cogni-tive scientists in investigating the research methods and theoretical assump-tions of cognitive science. At the beginning of the paper I point out, how the philosopher of science, here, the philosopher of (...) cognitive science, can participate in interdisciplinary research. I am opting of the cooperation in investigating the so-called reflective problems. Then, I discuss four examples of issues important for the cognitive science, in which the competences possessed by the philosopher are useful. At the ending I point out wider landscape of possible cooperation of philosophers with cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of scientific concepts has seen the simultaneous revival of operationalism and development of patchwork approaches to scientific concepts. We argue that these two approaches are natural allies. Both recognize an important role for measurement techniques in giving meaning to scientific terms. The association of multiple techniques with a single term, however, raises the threat of proliferating concepts (Hempel, 1966). While contemporary operationalists have developed some resources to address this challenge, these resources are inadequate to account (...) for the full range of complex behaviors of scientific concepts. We adopt show how the patchwork approach’s repertoire of inter-patch relations can expand the resources available to the operationalist. We focus on one especially important type of inter-patch relation: sharing a general reasoning strategy. General reasoning strategies serve two important functions: (1) they bind together distinct patches of scientific concepts, and (2) they provide normative guidance for extending concepts to new domains. (shrink)

The discovery of the engram, the physical substrate of memory, is a central challenge for the sciences of memory. Following the application of optogenetics to the neurobiological study of memory, scientists and philosophers claim that the engram has been found. In this paper, I evaluate the implications of applying optogenetic tools to the localization of the engram. I argue that conceptions of engram localization need to be revised to be made consistent with optogenetic studies of the engram. I distinguish between (...) challenges to vehicle and content localization. First, I consider the silent engram hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, optogenetic studies indicate that synaptic efficacy, the traditional engram-bearing vehicle, is important merely for retrieval. I argue that this interpretation rests upon a misunderstanding of accessibility. Second, I argue that optogenetic-based strategies and findings conflict with preservationist and constructivist views on memory storage. There is an enduring trace, but stored content may change over time and experience, resulting in doubt about what constitutes a single engram. (shrink)

The central task of cognitive neuroscience to map cognitive capacities to neural mechanisms faces three interlocking conceptual problems that together frame the problem of cognitive ontology. First, they must establish which tasks elicit which cognitive capacities, and specifically when different tasks elicit the same capacity. To address this operationalization problem, scientists often assess whether the tasks engage the same neural mechanisms. But to determine whether mechanisms are of the same or different kinds, we need to solve the abstraction problem by (...) determining which mechanistic differences are and are not relevant, and also the boundary problem by distinguishing the mechanism from its background conditions. Solving these problems, in turn, requires understanding how cognitive capacities are elicited in tasks. These three problems, which have been noted and discussed elsewhere in the literature, together form a ‘cycle of kinds’ that frames the central problem-space of cognitive ontology. We describe this cycle to clarify the intellectual challenges facing the cognitive ontologist and to reveal the kind of iterative process by which ontological revision in cognitive neuroscience is likely to unfold. (shrink)

Explanation is a perennially hot topic in philosophy of science. Yet philosophers have exhibited a curious blind spot to the questions of how explanatory projects develop over time, as well as what processes are involved in generating their developmental trajectories. This paper examines these questions using research into the end-Permian mass extinction as a case study. It takes as its jumping-off point the observation that explanations of historical events tend to grow more complex over time, but it goes beyond this (...) observation by scrutinizing the processes responsible for generating this pattern. Surveying several decades of research into the end-Permian extinction, I suggest that the principal “driver” of explanation in geohistory is non-explanatory work: work that is undertaken to increase our descriptive understanding of a phenomenon, not to test a particular explanatory claim. Non-explanatory work drives explanation by imposing or eliminating demands on explanation, and by furnishing new resources for constructing explanatory models. Explanations grow more complex because the demands on explanation tend to increase with ongoing characterization of the target phenomenon, and characterization tends grows the roster of explanatory resources. However, the fact that non-explanatory work sometimes eliminates demands on explanation means that this trend is not irreversible. I suggest that to achieve a more rounded view of the dynamics of explanation, philosophers should ask how research into complex phenomena is organized, as well as how explanatory progress depends upon the coordination of different kinds of material and epistemic resources. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate how researchers evaluate their characterizations of scientific phenomena. Characterizing phenomena is an important – albeit often overlooked – aspect of scientific research, as phenomena are targets of explanation and theorization. As a result, there is a lacuna in the literature regarding how researchers determine whether their characterization of a target phenomenon is appropriate for their aims. This issue has become apparent for accounts of scientific explanation that take phenomena to be explananda. In particular, philosophers who (...) endorse mechanistic explanation suggest that the discovery of the mechanisms that explain a phenomenon can lead to its recharacterization. However, they fail to make clear how these explanations provide warrant for recharacterizing their explananda phenomena. Drawing from cases of neurobiological research on potentiation phenomena, I argue that attempting to explain a phenomenon may provide reason to suspend judgment about its characterization, but this cannot provide warrant to recharacterize it if researchers cannot infer a phenomenon’s characteristics from this explanation. To explicate this, I go beyond explanation – mechanistic or otherwise – to analyze why and how researchers change their epistemic commitments in light of new evidence. (shrink)

New Mechanist philosophical models of "phenomenon reconstitution" understand the process to be driven by explanatory considerations. Here I discuss an episode of phenomenon reconstitution that occurred entirely within an experimental program dedicated to characterizing the phenomenon of kinesin motility. Rather than being driven by explanatory considerations, as standard mechanist views maintain, I argue that the phenomenon of kinesin motility was reconstituted to enhance researchers’ primary experimental tool—the single molecule motility assay.

This paper draws on the notion of “objects of research” in psychology as clusters of phenomena (Feest in Philos Sci 84:1165–1176, 2017) to analyze the productive role of folk psychological concepts—and the operational definitions that arise from them—in the development of concepts in scientific psychology. Using the case study of similarity, I discuss the role of the folk psychological concept in the regimentation of different measures of similarity judgments. I propose that by giving rise to operational definitions that lead to (...) experimental dissociation on the one hand, and by providing the concept with unity on the other hand, the folk psychological concept generates a productive tension that facilitates empirical and theoretical development of the scientific concept. (shrink)

The neuron doctrine, according to which nerves consist of discontinuous neurons, presented investigators with the challenge of determining what activities occurred between them or between them and muscles. One group of researchers, dubbed the sparks, viewed the electrical current in one neuron as inducing a current in the next neuron or in muscles. For them there was no gap between the activities of neurons or neurons and muscles that required filling with a new type of activity. A competing group, the (...) soups, came to argue for chemicals, subsequently referred to neurotransmitters, as carrying out the activities between neurons or between neurons and muscles. But even for them the conclusion that chemicals performed this activity was only arrived over time. I examine the prolonged period in which proponents of chemical transmission developed their account and challenged the sparks. My goal is to illuminate the epistemic processes that led to the discovery of a new scientific phenomenon—chemical transmission between neurons. (shrink)

Research devoted to characterizing phenomena is underappreciated in philosophical accounts of scientific inquiry. This paper develops a diachronic analysis of research over 100 years that led to the recognition of two related electrophysiological phenomena, the membrane potential and the action potential. A diachronic perspective allows for reconciliation of two threads in philosophical discussions of phenomena—Hacking’s treatment of phenomena as manifest in laboratory settings and Bogen and Woodward’s construal of phenomena as regularities in the world. The diachronic analysis also reveals the (...) epistemic tasks that contribute to establishing phenomena, including the development of appropriate investigative techniques and concepts for characterizing them. (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the nature of linguistic competence, the capacity to understand and produce sentences of natural language. I defend the empiricist account of linguistic competence embedded in the connectionist cognitive science. This strand of cognitive science has been opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science, coupled with transformational-generative grammar, which was committed to nativism due to the view that human cognition, including language capacity, should be construed in terms of symbolic representations and hardwired rules. Similarly, linguistic (...) competence in this framework was regarded as being innate, rule-governed, domain-specific, and fundamentally different from performance, i.e., idiosyncrasies and factors governing linguistic behavior. I analyze state-of-the-art connectionist, deep learning models of natural language processing, most notably large language models, to see what they can tell us about linguistic competence. Deep learning is a statistical technique for the classification of patterns through which artificial intelligence researchers train artificial neural networks containing multiple layers that crunch a gargantuan amount of textual and/or visual data. I argue that these models suggest that linguistic competence should be construed as stochastic, pattern-based, and stemming from domain-general mechanisms. Moreover, I distinguish syntactic from semantic competence, and I show for each the ramifications of the endorsement of a connectionist research program as opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science and transformational-generative grammar. I provide a unifying front, consisting of usage-based theories, a construction grammar approach, and an embodied approach to cognition to show that the more multimodal and diverse models are in terms of architectural features and training data, the stronger the case is for the connectionist linguistic competence. I also propose to discard the competence vs. performance distinction as theoretically inferior so that a novel and integrative account of linguistic competence originating in connectionism and empiricism that I propose and defend in the dissertation could be put forward in scientific and philosophical literature. (shrink)

Scientists represent their world, grouping and organizing phenomena into classes by means of concepts. Philosophers of science have historically been interested in the nature of these concepts, the criteria that inform their application and the nature of the kinds that the concepts individuate. They also have sought to understand whether and how different systems of classification are related and more recently, how investigative practices shape conceptual development and change. Our aim in this paper is to provide a critical overview of (...) some of the key developments in this philosophical literature and identify some interesting issues it raises about the prospects of the so-called “special sciences”, including psychiatry, psychology, and the mind-brain sciences more generally, to discover natural kinds. (shrink)