To a significant extent, mainstream Western philosophy is not empirically minded. The neurophilosophy of the Churchlands seems to exhibit the greatest divergence from this orientation by far. Extending and neuralizing Quine’s naturalism, the Churchlands have been known to challenge most assumptions and principles of contemporary mainstream analytic and even existing naturalistic philosophies. Even the philosophers who identify themselves as full-blown naturalists have an inexplicably negative attitude toward the Churchlands. For many philosophers of the mind, the Churchlands’ problem is not that (...) they are philosophically wrong, but that they have no philosophical approach that could be wrong. They are nonphilosophers working at philosophy departments. Proper philosophy is not what they do or think they are doing. In this article, I argue to the contrary. The Churchlands would seem surprisingly moderate, and neither trivial nor near-trivial, when closely scrutinized. (shrink)

The criminal law depends upon 'commonsense' or 'folk' psychology, a seemingly innate theory used by all normal human beings as a means to understand and predict other humans' behavior. This paper discusses two major types of arguments that commonsense psychology is not a true theory of human behavior, and thus should be eliminated and replaced. The paper argues that eliminitivist projects fail to provide evidence that commonsense psychology is a false theory, and argues that there is no need to seek (...) a replacement theory of behavior for use in the criminal law. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this article I argue that brain images constructed with computerized tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) are part of a category of “expert images” and are both visually persuasive and also particularly difficult to interpret and understand by non-experts. Following the innovative judicial analogy of “demonstrative evidence” traced by Jennifer Mnookin (1998), I show how brain images are more than mere illustrations when they enter popular culture and courtrooms. Attending to the role of experts in producing data (...) in the form of images, in selecting extreme images for publication, and in testifying as to their relevance, I argue that there is an undue risk in courtrooms that brain images will not be seen as prejudiced, stylized representations of correlation, but rather as straightforward, objective photographs of, for example, madness. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that as we learn more about how we might intervene in the brain in ways that impact human behavior, the scope of what counts as “moral behavior” becomes smaller and smaller because things we successfully manipulate using evidence-based science are often things that fall outside the sphere of morality. Consequently, the argument that we are morally obligated to morally enhance our neighbors starts to fall apart, not because humans should be free to make terrible choices, (...) but because morality is not something subject to such manipulation. To illustrate my argument, I shall use the rise of veteran diversion courts in the United States as a putative instance of an intervention designed to change human behavior for the better. Part of my purpose in working my way through this case study is to demonstrate that many philosophers have the psychology of immoral action wrong. (shrink)