Archive: Psychology
The doddering Hans effect
Psychology
·· More from January 2012
Another well-worn example bites the dust? You remember that famous study in which the participants, if primed with words connoting agedness, walked more slowly when leaving the lab.
A new study by the Belgian team of Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, and Axel Cleeremans not only failed to replicate the effect, but also appeared to show that the effect observed in the original study was owing to the experimenters’ expectations.
Experimenters’ expectations seem to provide a favorable context to the behavioral expression of the prime. Obviously, this interpretation remains tentative, as we do not know how this process operates. However, it is likely that [experimenter-subjects] who expect their participants to walk slower behave differently than those who expect their participants to walk faster and that such behavioral cues are picked up by participants.
Key findings:
- The setup was one that included not only the usual subjects being primed or not with a scrambled-sentence task, but also other “experimenter-subjects” whose task it was to time the usual subjects’ passage down the hall as they left the lab. Doyen et al “were indeed able to obtain the priming effect on walking speed for both subjective and objective timings. Crucially, however, this was only possible by manipulating [experimenter-subjects’] expectations in such a way that they would expect primed participants to walk slower”.
- Subjective timings (with a stopwatch) yielded errors when experimenter-subjects were told that subjects would be primed to walk faster as well as when they were told that subjects would be primed to walk slower. But objective timings yielded an effect only when the priming was for walking more slowly; no effect was observed when the priming and the experimenter--subjects’ expectations were at odds.
The authors agree that unconscious behavioral priming appears to be well established,
in line with our result it seems that these methods need to be taken as an object of research per se before using it can be considered as an established phenomenon.
It’s worth noting that Doyen et al do not report any awareness on the subjects’ part of having been cued by the experimenter-subjects, even though there was some awareness (as revealed by a forced-choice test) of the priming (not as priming, but as a salient feature of the stimulus).
- Anonymous. (2012) “Behavioral priming paradigm needs update”. Medical Xpress 18 Jan 2012.
- J. A. Bargh, M. Chen, L. Burrows. (1996) “Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action”. Journal of personal & social psychology 71.2:230-44. See also Bargh and Chartrand, “The unbearable automaticity of being”, American Psychologist, 54.7 (1999) 462-479, available here.
- S. Doyen, O. Klein, C.-L. Pichon, A Cleeremans. (2012) “Behavioral priming: it's all in the mind, but whose mind?” PLoS ONE 7.1: e29081. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029081
On magnets and lies, and checking sources
The historian’s attitude, when attempting to establish matters of fact, toward the sources, is one of tempered but universal skepticism. The same applies to the history of the present. For example:
Don’t depend on popularizations for your knowledge of neuroscience (see the previous item in this blog for a similar issue concerning the biology of sex). A recent headline in several newspapers and online sources reads something like this: “Magnetic Pulses To The Brain Make It Impossible To Lie”. Wow! That’s exciting! And scary too…
The only problem is, it’s false. The original study, which takes two minutes to retrieve if you have access to the journal (Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 225.1 (Nov 2011) 209-214; doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.07.028) states its main result as follows:
In our study we found support for the general hypothesis: rTMS targeted at DLPFC changed spontaneous truth-telling/lying rate in a task with no mock-criminal, guilty knowledge, or personally relevant information processing contexts being involved. Importantly, clear hemispheric differences were found. In principle, artificial inhibition of the sustained neuronal activation-states in left DLPFC and possibly the concomitant effect on the systems intimately associated with DLPFC decreases the willingness to tell the truth (more non-truthful answers produced) and/or increases the willingness to tell lies. Conversely, inhibitory rTMS effect on right DLPFC and possibly the concomitant secondary effect on the DLPFC-associated systems increases willingness to tell truth (more truthful answers produced) and/or decreases willingness (or capability) to lie.
[Acronyms unpacked: rTMS = repetitive transcranial (from outside through the skull) magnetic stimulation; DLPFC = dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.]
The authors carefully note the limitations of their study.
- The effects of the magnetic stimulation may spread beyond the area adjacent to the coil; and so “ interpretations on causal effects of TMS exclusively through the TMS-targeted area should be taken with care”.
- The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has many functions, and in a complicated task like “spontaneous” lying more than one may be activated: because “perceptual stimuli had to be named and two response variants chosen and reversed from time to time, the number of possible neural mechanisms that influence readiness to lie in our task and their possible interactions remain too numerous at present” to be sorted out.
- The spontaneity of the lying was limited to some unknown degree. Subjects were “instructed to name the colour correctly or just lie about it, naming the other colour that was not presented in this trial, being free to choose whether to lie or not”, but they were also told that only lying or only telling the truth would not be “good for the experiment”.
The upshot is that there is a positive correlation between spontaneous truth-telling and rTMS stimulation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; and between spontaneous lying and stimulation of the left DLPFC. That’s very interesting. But it’s far from what you would gather from the headlines and stories online.
The moral should be obvious. In matters of science, there is no substitute for reading the original studies. Science journalists, and for that matter popularizing philosophers, should be drawn upon cautiously. Moreover, the studies often present complexities and issues (as here) that summaries, especially of the ax-grinding sort, tend to omit.
I learned this long ago when reading studies on animal perception that were cited over and over in the philosophical literature on representation. It was clear that only a few people had read the original studies; everyone else drew on their predecessors’ summaries. When I read the original studies, I discovered not only mistakes in the summaries but also a world of fascinating work that the “poor diet of examples” in the literature had simply omitted. Insect senses in particular offered much food for thought, and I recommend it highly if you’re thinking about the origins of representation or defining sensory modalities.
Philosophers have done a better job in the last twenty years. A much broader range of scientific results is brought to bear on philosophical debate, and prejudices according to which doing so is somehow unphilosophical have waned. Experimental Philosophy even generates its own results. But it’s well worth remembering, both when doing philosophy and when judging scientific results of political import, that although a great deal of expertise is required to contribute to ongoing research, rather less is needed to acquire a basic understanding of the results of research, to understand their limitations, and to evaluate second-hand accounts.
Anticipations
Psychology
·· More from August 2011
Jeffrey Zacks, a colleague here in Psychology, and his collaborators have been studying human perception of events for the last ten years. A recent paper, in press at the Journal of cognitive neuroscience, and available at his website (pdf) argues that perceptual event boundaries occur in experience at points where prediction becomes difficult.
[…] working memory representations of the current event guide perceptual predictions about the immediate future [less than 10 sec]. These predictions are checked against what happens next in the perceptual stream; most of the time perceptual predictions about what happens next are accurate. From time to time, however, activity becomes less predictable, causing a spike in prediction errors. These spikes in prediction error are fed back to update working memory and reorient the organism to salient new features in the environment. According to this model, the increase in prediction error and consequent updating results in the subjective experience of an event boundary in perceptual experience.
The tenets of Zacks’s view are (i) that the unity of experience consists in representations actively maintained in working memory; (ii) present experience consists partly in anticipations of future experiences. Memory, insofar as it enters the stream of experience, would be on this account proleptic, forward-looking; mere recall has no place.
Aristotle says that animals don’t recollect: they don’t search their memories for information about the past (De memoria ii, 453a8, Hist. anim. 488b26; see Grote, Aristotle 476). On what grounds he said that I don’t know, but whether it was a shrewd surmise or a lucky guess he seems to have been right. Aristotle also put forward a version of what became the predominant philosophical picture of memory—that it consists in the registering of an “impression” which is subsequently to be recalled, as if the mind had a filing-card drawer or a mental museum (such as figured in Ancient and Renaissance arts memoriæ). That picture, attractive though it is, may well be fundamentally misleading. Modelling biological memory on the specifically human capacity that consists in voluntary recall of items subject to intersubjective standards of accuracy (e.g., the procedures of memorization employed by the reciters of epic poetry, to take an example Aristotle would have known) may turn out to be yet another case where intuition has led us astray.
A predominantly proleptic function for working memory, moreover, fits nicely with theories according to which perception requires activity on the part of the perceiver, so that the perception of red, for example, to use Mohan’s example (taken from Justin Broackes) is effectively the perception of a pattern of sensations that arises from the perceiver’s having regarded the red thing from several perspectives—a feat normally posssible only by moving. Event perception too may be governed, if not by activity itself, then by anticipations of activity.
On the difference of humans from animals and the difference it makes
This is a response to a post on Justin Erik Halldór Smith by the philosopher of that name, and containing comments by Abraham Stone and Frans de Waal. You might well want to read that first before reading this.
The problematic here can be found already in Spinoza and Bayle. It can be resolved into two challenges to the person who holds that there is a profound difference, in the moral sphere, between humans and animals. The first challenge is to exhibit a difference between humans and every other species of living thing that is not a mere matter of degree; the second is to show that that difference has moral significance, e.g. that on its basis we have duties toward humans that we don’t have toward animals. I’m not sure even the first challenge can be met, let alone the second.
Every time I read Spinoza I’m troubled by the lack of motivation for his claim that humans can treat animals as we please (subject to their “natural right” against us, which is nothing more than their power to resist or overcome us). 
His account of the difference is that it is a matter of complexity; but complexity is a matter of degree; it is, moreover, not easily seen to be of moral significance, and certainly not to the degree required for the contrast Spinoza draws. I think Abe is on the right track when he says that the main motivation for making the possession of reason an all-or-nothing affair is to build as high a wall as possible between us and the rest of the living world; and if even so vernunftgetrunkenen a philosopher as Spinoza gets swept away by prejudice, then clearly something powerful lies behind it.
The best one can do on Spinoza’s behalf, I think, is to take it that in the Part 4 conception of morality the only basis other than power for rights (or rather for justice) is the Hobbesian state, which requires the capacity to understand and enter into contracts. Only humans, it would seem, have this capacity, and so only humans fall within the scope of justice. It’s still not easy to see how this squares with the physiological notions of Part 2, but at least the criterion is not arbitrary, and not a matter simply of our having more power. (As for the good of Part 5, the eternal love of God, that would seem to be accessible to every individual to the limit of its capacities for adequate knowledge.)
Taking this into the present, the evidence now favors the claim that intelligence is a matter of degree—except for the matter of language use. But here two additional issues would need to be addressed: whether the capacity to use language is an indissoluble, all-or-nothing capacity and whether the appearance of a discontinuity between us and the rest of the animal kingdom isn’t perhaps an artifact of the extinction of other hominids intermediate in capacity between us and surviving primates. If there are stages or degrees in language-acquisition, some of which are already present in extant species, and a full spectrum of which would have been instantiated in our hominid relatives, then in order to make “the” capacity to use language decisive you would have to explain why the precise version of it possessed by humans, or rather why the difference between that version and the others, should have moral significance. I myself don’t see much hope of that.
I think the point about our comprehension of one another as human is well taken (JS: “The only reason why we don't have any problem attributing intelligence to other human minds is that we need to suppose their existence on practical grounds”). I would add that humans who are not prepossessed by the thought that there is some deep metaphysical divide between us and the rest of the living world, though they of course distinguish themselves from other species, often regard animals as having minds. The “theory of mind” is not restricted to humans. We model them as childlike, as dependent, in part because in human society they are dependent, in part because like children they don’t have all the capacities or knowledge of adult humans. Nevertheless domestic animals, the ones we live with for years, and whom we get to know as individuals, have a sort of moral standing; and if that is thought to be some sort of invention, then I need to have shown to me the grounds upon which our attribution of moral standing to each other is not.
March 11, 2011
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Quitting
There are, I suppose, people who come to hate smoking when they give it up. I don’t. I do dislike the taste of it in my mouth now. That is my primary device to turn away the urge when it comes. But I don’t think that smoking is evil. It harms the body: that much is certain. For that reason I prefer having quit to the alternative.
Smoking also makes you more or less completely a slave. The means, often time-consuming, sometimes self-abasing, by which dedicated smokers overcome the inconveniences put in their way testify to that. As do the rationalizations for continuing to smoke. Which is not to say that there isn’t some merit to the thought that disapproval of smoking is part of an increasingly repressive culture, one in which perceived risk provides a pretext for greater surveillance and control.
Women are from Venus, men are from Venus
Psychology
·· More from October 2007
You may have heard about the new study that purports to show that women are less happy than men. Fortunately, Language Log has developed a vaccine that will immunize you against the stupidity issuing from, among other venues, the New York Times. Meanwhile, Deborah Cameron argues in the Guardian that with respect to their use of language, men and women aren’t all that different (see also her new book, The myth of Mars and Venus, from which the Guardian piece is an extract; find it at Best Book Buys, isbn.nu, Powells, ABE).
Psychographics: obsessive-compulsive
The brain apparently has a “checklist”—a means of recording that some sequence of actions is finished (see MIT Neuroscientists Describe Brain's ‘Checklist’, Science Daily 8 Sep 2003, on work by Ann M. Graybiel and Naotaka Fujii). A malfunctioning checklist might lead to obsessive-compulsive behavior. 
Kevin Burton, Feedblog.
Kevin Burton, Feedblog.David Brooks on the emotions of boys and men
It’s time for a new stereotype: Right-wingers don’t know science. But they still make propaganda from what they think they know. Exhibit #1 is from Mark Liberman at LanguageLog:
Mark Liberman, “David Brooks, cognitive neuroscientist”, LanguageLog 12 Jun 2006.
—, “Are men emotional children?”, LanguageLog 24 Jun 2006.
In his first post Liberman looks at one paper, presumably representative, on the topic of sex differences in learning. The paper concludes that for pictures that aroused intense negative emotions, women’s memories were, in a group comparison, somewhat better than men’s.
Turhan Canli et al., “Sex differences in the neural basis of emotional memories”, PNAS 99.16 (6 Aug 2002).
Associated with that finding were differences in activation patterns in the brain. But those differences must be set against a background of community. The two sexes “share an extensive network of structures associated with attention, language, and motor control that are associated with emotional arousal”; and, as Liberman notes, if we could see the raw data we would likely find a great deal of variation among individuals.Even more telling is a second post. Brooks’s source turns out to be Why gender matters by Leonard Sax. Sax grossly misinterprets a paper concerning responses to pictures of faces exhibiting various negative emotions. He claims that “the locus [in male brains] of brain activity associated with negative emotion remains stuck in the the amygdala”. In girls responses to negative emotion are supposed to shift to cerebral cortex during adolescence, in boys they don’t. From Liberman’s careful examination it is apparent that the study by Killgore et al. proves very little. The samples are very small, and individual differences between members of the same sex come close to swamping supposed differences between the sexes. The paper certainly does not support the claims of Sax or Brooks.
Killgore, William D. S.; Oki, Mika; Yurgelun-Todd, Deborah A., "Sex-specific developmental changes in amygdala responses to affective faces," Neuroreport 12.2 (Feb 2001): 427-433.
Brooks admits to being scientifically illiterate. Sax has an M.D. He also has an agenda, which is to promote single-sex public schools. The National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE), which seems to consist in Sax and an assistant, advertises his book prominently. The NASSPE has regional meetings every year. The Northeast Conference is co-sponsored with a charter-school outfit, Victory Schools, and a Transformation Life Coach who has founded the Academy For Leadership and Transformation (which seems to be nothing other than the Coach herself). It will set you back $325 plus $165 for accommodations.
Single-sex education may be a good thing, although memories of high-school gym, admittedly a special case, suggest that it has its drawbacks. But misinterpreting science is not. And even if the conclusions of the paper by Killgore et al. had been correctly stated, the inferences Brooks wants to draw from them are far from being justified.
Addicted to risk?
Psychology
·· More from March 2006
Acetylcholine
Becoming addicted to nicotine, opiates, and so on is risky behavior. But it may be that eliminating the propensity to addiction would also eliminate risk-taking in general.
Nicotine binds to receptors known as nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). These receptors have five subunits, one of which is the beta2 subunit. Mice lacking this subunit exhibit “mild learning impairment”; they also do not learn to self-administer nicotine.
Nicotine receptors with the beta2 subunit are found throughout the brain. In particular they occur in the midbrain ventral tegmental area (VTA), which is “strongly implicated in the response to natural rewards, such as food or sex”. Mice with beta2 subunits will self-administer nicotine and other addictive substances directly to the VTA. A group at the laboratory of Jean-Pierre Changeux has shown that in mice lacking the beta2 subunit, introducing that subunit directly into the VTA by means of a virus encoding it resulted in the formation of nAChRs containing that subunit.
The experiments by Maskos et al. and Kauer et al. are said to
firmly connect exploratory behavior with VTA cell function, as well as providing a causal link between a specific nAChR subunit and this behavior. It remains to be determined which human behaviors are analogous to exploratory behavior in the mouse.
For pictures, see “Nicotinic Receptors” at Chemistry of drugs and the brain, Emory University, last modified 11 Apr 2000; Bryan Grieg Fry, “Neurotoxins”, Venomdoc, s. d.
Sources
Champtiaux, N. & Changeux, J. P. 2004. Progess in Brain Research 145:235–251.
Kauer, Julie A. 2005. Nature 436:31.
Maskos, U. et al. 2005. Nature. 436:103–107.
Picciotto, M. R. et al. 1995. Nature 374:65–67.
Miscellany
I’m unlikely to be the first to alert anyone to the current outrage or today’s sin against reason. Time and energy don’t allow it, not to mention a lack of expertise. Perhaps it’s not so bad that some weblogs should be slow. Weblog software is biased toward an evanescent present, to instantaneous response: but instantaneous responses are by and large stock responses, as I. A. Richards called them. Questions at talks are often stock questions: they’re what you would ask if someone were to argue for materialism or consequentialism. We know the moves after all. That’s part of being an academic philosopher, part of being an original philosopher too. It’s not surprising that those weblogs that consist mostly in links to news items sometimes content themselves with more-or-less long-winded equivalents of mmm or yuck. Good for rallying the troops, not so good for real thinking.
That, in any case, is my excuse for pulling together, belatedly, a few things that have accumulated over the last month or so.
A school for atheists
French, of course. Athéisme, l’homme majuscule is in pure form that secular humanism which Bill O’Reilly thinks is going to take over the country, along with George Soros and the ACLU. Citations, biographies, humor, the Song of Songs, even a section of atheist apologetics. I’m pleased to see them noticing Paul Léautaud, whose literary journal is among the best I know of. Among the (not very well sourced) citations: “La seule foi qui me reste—et encore!—c’est la foi dans les dictionnaires”, which is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s remark about grammar.
Atheism is enjoying a bit of a vogue in France, with help of Michel Onfray’s Traité d’athéologie (2246648017: Amazon.fr, Chapitre) and the Cours accéléré d'athéisme
by Antonio Lopez Campillo and Juan Ignacio Ferrera (2930390042: Amazon.fr, Chapitre). Atheism seems to me on the whole a shallower position than theism. That isn’t a criticism but an observation: once you’ve said there’s no God, there isn’t much more to say. What remains is to develop an ethics that rigorously avoids any appeal to the supersensible.
Interconnectedness
Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, is the author of Aetiology, a weblog on disease and public health issues, with occasional remarks on academic life. One entry in her old weblog, “This view of life”, caught my eye. Smith is drawn to biology by the variety of life, by the endless supply of puzzles it presents. Smith starts from an essay in the New York Times (registration required) by Olivia Judson, author of Dr. Tatiana’s sex advice to all creation. In biology, says Judson,
small facts add up to big pictures. For although Mother Nature’s infinite variety seems incomprehensible at first, it is not. The forces of nature are not random; often, they are strongly predictable.
For example, if you were to discover a new species and you told me that the male is much bigger than the female, I would tell you what the mating system is likely to be: males fight each other for access to females. Or if you discover that the male’s testicles make up a large part of his weight, I can tell you that the females in his species consort with several males at a time.
Suppose you find that a particular bacterium lives exclusively in the gullets of leeches and helps them digest blood. Then I can tell you how that bacterium’s genome is likely to differ from those of its free-living cousins; among other changes, the genome will be smaller, and it will have lost sets of genes that are helpful for living free but useless for living inside another being.
Creationism, I should note, hasn’t a prayer of explaining any of these relations. What interests me more is Smith’s final paragraphs:
Elsewhere online, I was involved in a discussion about evolution with a number of people with a host of different beliefs, from atheist to a self-described fundamentalist Christian. One Christian (who actually happens to be in seminary) stated his view on the topic:
And for me, there is something deeply spiritual about that idea, of connectedness to all of the planet on some level. I don’t find that evolution challenges my spirit; rather, learning more about how nature interconnects allows me to find more footing with my own life and walk with God.
This feeling of interconnection is something any of us can experience, regardless of our religious beliefs (or lack thereof). To steal a quote from Darwin, there is grandeur in this view of life—and I’m happy I evolved.
The seminarian offers a gloss on the fact of interconnectedness: it is “spiritual”, in a Kantian way—suggestive of ends (and of nature’s being ordered to ends) but in no way demonstrating them. The relation to God intimated in interconnection is the Spinozan relation of being “part of nature”, in necessary relation to the whole; at least that seems to me a more natural conclusion than orthodox theism. You may hold as Leibniz did that all of nature is related and still set God apart from nature as its transcendent cause, wholly distinct from created things by virtue of being perfect. Interconnectedness is ambiguously suggestive of both.
Returning to Athéisme, under the rubric “Science” I find this:
La religion, la première, a tenté d’apporter des réponses à ces questions, le plus souvent sous forme de certitudes puisées dans une Révélation divine (cas des grands monothéismes).
L’usage de rationalité et la libération progressive de la pensée de l’emprise des religions ont permis à la métaphysique d’échafauder des théories explicatives, certes basées sur un raisonnement logique mais purement spéculatif car inaccessible à l’expérimentation.
Au siècle des “Lumières”, les sciences qui entraient dans leur époque moderne, ont pris conscience de l’impossibilité, en raison des limites mêmes de la condition humaine, d’acquérir des connaissances au-delà de l’expérience et donc de la vanité de la quête de l’absolu.
La science, par ses méthodes, sa rigueur, son humilité (elle ne prétend pas donner des réponses immuables ou des certitudes), ses résultats concrets et vérifiables expérimentalement, donne des réponses qui sont quasi universellement admises (quasi, car il existe encore des créationnistes !). Les domaines couverts par la science sont de plus en plus larges, ce qui oblige les religions et la métaphysique à se repositionner régulièrement par rapport à elle.
La curiosité et l’intérêt de l’homme pour ce qui l’entoure sont tels que les questions qui ne sont pas encore résolues par la science ne sont pas prêtes de s’épuiser. La religion et la métaphysique, qui se nourrissent de l’ignorance des hommes, ont encore du grain à moudre. La critique obstinée des vérités “révélées” par les religions ou des abstractions réifiées, puis déifiées par la métaphysique, est un combat indispensable pour que l’homme puisse réellement prendre entre ses mains sa destinée et rendre le monde plus humain.
Manifestos tend to be heaps of unargued commonplaces. This one is no exception. The threefold division—religion, metaphysics, science—is straight from Auguste Comte. It’s as if the anthropology and history of science of the last sixty years had never existed. But let’s consider just one claim more closely: that “religion and metaphysics feed upon the ignorance of men”.
This is meant to be an objection. But the ground of the objection cannot be merely that religion and metaphysics address matters on which we are ignorant. Science does too. Nor can it be even that they take up questions that science does not, unless you take a hard positivist line and rule out such questions as meaningless. But ethics, for one, is not meaningless, even though at least part of its subject matter lies outside the range of questions science can address.
The objection isn’t really to disciplines that inquire into matters not (yet) addressed by science, but to the methods that religion and metaphysics use to answer them: revelation and speculation. Consider speculation—“raisonnement inaccessible à l’expérimentation”. It’s not easy to find a metaphysics that has no relation to experience; and I’m not sure what a metaphysical “experiment” would be. The authors seem to be running together two sorts of claim:
- (i) The claim, Kantian in spirit, that certain questions—summarized by the phrase “the quest for the absolute”—cannot even in principle be settled by appeal to experience;
- (ii) The claim that only experiment, and not just experience generally, yields genuine knowledge.
The second is more restrictive than the first. How much more depends on the definition of “experiment”. Too narrow a definition will consign history to the flames. I’m not sure that (ii) can be made plausible except by defining ‘experiment’ merely as some sort of test to which experience is essential. But then (ii) is effectively equivalent to (i).
Concerning (i): Kant’s position, in brief, is that reason itself demands that we move from the conditioned (e.g. a determinate region of space) to the unconditioned (space without limits). This is not the result of some argumentum ad ignorantiam but a product of reflection on what being conditioned presupposes. Kant himself did not so much rule out metaphysics as put it in its place: the Ideas of metaphysics (God, space, time, the harmonious unity of the laws of nature) have no role in the determination of the objects of thought, and thus no role in science; nevertheless they remain indispensable to thought and even to science, as conditions on the conversion of experience into knowledge that cannot be proved from experience itself (nor applied to it, as the categories are).
What I’m summarizing is the murkiest part of the Critique of pure reason. Opinions differ, to say the least, on what Kant was up to and whether he succeeded. Still what I’ve said is enough to show that the Kantian claim (i) need not commit you to a combat with religion or metaphysics. Indeed if you want to revive the “warfare between science and theology” (historically a dubious notion, I should note), it would seem that you must either argue that outside science there is no knowledge or else grant that religion does have testable consequences that science can refute.
The critique of dubious religious or metaphysical claims is a worthwhile project. I don’t think it is well served by dubious history or question-begging arguments.
Briefly noted
- The neuroscience of regret:
From Cosma Shalizi’s Three-toed sloth.— Nathalie Camille, Giorgio Coricelli, Jerome Sallet, Pascale Pradat-Diehl, Jean-René Duhamel and Angela Sirigu, “The involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex in the experience of regret”, Science 305 (2004): 1167--1170. Punchline: “The orbitofrontal cortex has a fundamental role in mediating the experience of regret”. There is a comment by David Eagleman (308 (27 May 2005):1260) and a response by the authors.
- The neuroscience of intuition:
From Neurotopia.— One class of neuron, known as Van Economo neurons, resides in the fronto-insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Those two areas of the brain are “active during social situations”, when we’re assessing other people’s beliefs and desires; they also process “the conscious monitoring of visceral activity”. As Neurotopia notes, the expression “gut feeling” may have some truth to it.
- Old fogies still have it in ’em:
From Postclassic. —At least some old fogies. Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David Galenson distinguishes two kinds of artist: the experimental artist and the conceptual innovator. The innovator is at his or her best under 40; experimenters reach their peak at 40 or later. (Galenson is an economist at Chicago.)
