P. M. S. Hacker - Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

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Denis Noble CBE FRS hon FRCP

The publication of the second edition of this book nearly two decades after its first publication is a suitable occasion to review what it achieves and why that is important.

It has certainly succeeded in bringing a high degree of rigour to the interaction between science and philosophy in the field of neuroscience. Many of the questions raised by scientific discovery are conceptual and cannot be answered by further empirical discovery alone. Nor can conceptual analysis be dissociated completely from empirical discovery. As just one example, the deep questions about the nature of our universe raised by the discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity would not have seemed relevant if nineteenth-century certainties about a purely deterministic universe working in a purely Cartesian space had been confirmed. That is one of the reasons why collaboration between active scientists and active philosophers is necessary.

It is also one of the reasons the authors refer in their introduction to ‘the fact that the potentiality for conceptual confusion is buried deep in our language. Such confusions can be eliminated for a few decades by painstaking conceptual analysis. But they will rise again, as younger generations fall into the same traps. Sense data died under critical onslaught in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the end of the century internal representations arose phoenixlike from their ashes.’

It seems to me to be obvious that language needs constant re-analysis as the meanings of words change, new metaphors arise and new potential confusions occur. Yet, by and large, twentieth-century science was not ready to accept that philosophy had anything of any importance to contribute. That view was based on the idea that science and philosophy as they were understood in the seventeenth century had confused the two, even to the extent of naming the first scientific journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . Originally published in 1665, its first editor, Henry Oldenburg, was as much at home discussing (in long correspondences in Latin) with the philosopher Benedict Spinoza as he was with the scientist Isaac Newton. One of Spinoza’s great philosophical works was nearly published in the journal.

In later centuries the idea grew that, once issues that had initially been raised as philosophical issues had become the subject of practical empirical enquiry, there was no longer any need for further philosophical analysis. That depended of course on the conviction that the initial conceptual distinctions had been set in stone and were no longer open to question.

I see the signs that the twenty-first century is proving to be more aware of the pitfalls this creates. To take just one example that has been the subject of my own research recently, the discoveries that led to the so-called central dogma of molecular biology, formulated by Crick in 1958 after the earlier empirical discovery of the double helix, were presented in the last century as an unquestioned empirical fact. Yet the reason they were viewed in that way was itself based on a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the DNA molecules. Following in the footsteps of the quantum-mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger, the genetic material was assumed to reproduce itself like a crystal. You will find that assumption hidden away in the textbooks, and sometimes openly acknowledged in the popularizations, such as Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene , where he explicitly says, of DNA replication, that ‘This is how crystals are formed.’

We now know that DNA does not function like a crystal in living cells, nor does it reproduce itself accurately. In fact, the copying process is so inaccurate that there would be hundreds of thousands of copy errors if the cell did not come in to ensure faithful transmission to the next generation by systematically proof-correcting the inaccurate copies.