Neuroscience

John Zerilli (University of Otago)
Evidence of the pervasiveness of neural reuse in the human brain has forced a revision of the standard conception of modularity in the cognitive sciences. One persistent line of argument against such revision, however, draws from a large body of experimental literature attesting to the existence of cognitive dissociations. While numerous rejoinders to this argument have been offered over the years, few have grappled seriously with the phenomenon. This paper offers a fresh perspective. It takes the dissociations seriously, on the one hand, while affirming that traditional modularities of mind do not do justice to the evidence of neural reuse, on the other. The key to the puzzle is neural redundancy. The paper offers both a philosophical analysis of the relation between reuse and redundancy, as well as a solution to the problem of dissociations.

Mario Guenther (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy)
We impose properties of causation, as assumed in cognitive neuroscience, upon Woodward's (2005, 2015) account of interventionism. Within the resulting framework, we investigate to what extent we are justified to derive causal relations between mental properties and properties of the brain, if certain methods are used in the neuroscientific studies.

John Bickle (Mississippi State University)
Tool development in contemporary neurobiology exemplifies Hacking's insistence that experiment has a "life of its own" independent of theory. Previously Bickle argued for this using the development of gene targeting techniques and optogenetics/DREADDs. Here I extend Bickle's conclusions with another case of tool development that revolutionized neurobiology, David Hubel's metal microelectrode. Hubel's writings reveal an experiment-first attitude about science; but this case illustrates how engineering concerns drive experiment tool development in neurobiology, and how theory tags behind. The metascientific study of tool development in neurobiology provides a useful contrast to the theory-centrism still prominent in philosophy of science.

Morgan Thompson (University of Pittsburgh)
I argue for a second type of robustness analysis that has not yet been expounded upon in the philosophical literature. The two types of robustness analysis are most appropriate when researchers are in different epistemic situations regarding the target system, have different success and failure conditions, are prone to misapplication in different ways, and follow different rules for defining the set of models explored. My account of scope robustness analysis better accounts for robustness analyses that explore growth principles in network neuroscience and biology where well accepted models of the target system already exist (e.g., C. elegans wiring diagram).

Zina B. Ward (University of Pittsburgh)
Individual differences complicate the neuroscientific task of aggregating and comparing data across human brains. Many researchers have adopted a "cartographic approach" in response to this challenge, in which they register data from multiple subjects to a common brain template. Here I argue that there is no ideal, universally applicable registration procedure to map brains to templates. The method that is best depends on the phenomenon of interest. This position, which I call registration pluralism, has important methodological implications, three of which I discuss here: it complicates or undercuts efforts to develop multi-modal atlases, functional registration methods, and standardized preprocessing pipelines.