No Nonsense Neuro-law
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COMMENTARY
No Nonsense Neuro-law Sarah K. Robins & Carl F. Craver
Received: 28 April 2009 / Accepted: 8 June 2009 / Published online: 16 July 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract In Minds, Brains, and Norms, Pardo and Patterson deny that the activities of persons (knowledge, rule-following, interpretation) can be understood exclusively in terms of the brain, and thus conclude that neuroscience is irrelevant to the law, and to the conceptual and philosophical questions that arise in legal contexts. On their view, such appeals to neuroscience are an exercise in nonsense. We agree that understanding persons requires more than understanding brains, but we deny their pessimistic conclusion. Whether neuroscience can be used to address legal issues is an empirical question. Recent work on locked-in syndrome, memory, and lying suggests that neuroscience has potential relevance to the law, and is far from nonsensical. Through discussion of neuroscientific methods and these recent results we show how an understanding of the subpersonal mechanisms that underlie person-level abilities could serve as a valuable and illuminating source of evidence in legal and social contexts. In so doing, we sketch the way forward for a no-nonsense approach to the intersection of law and neuroscience. Keywords Personal/Subpersonal distinction . Neuroscience . Law
S. K. Robins (*) : C. F. Craver Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. F. Craver e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction: Sorting Sense from Nonsense Pardo and Patterson accuse contemporary neuroscientists of engaging in nonsense. It is not that neuroscientists have false or misleading ideas about the brain and its relation to the mind. Rather, their ideas are so thoroughly confused that they are gibberish: The upshot of this conclusion is not that claims that the brain ‘follows rules,’ ‘interprets’, and ‘knows’ are false; it is that these claims are lacking in sense (2010). Pardo and Patterson thus conclude that neuroscience has few, if any, implications for thinking about the law. They borrow from a long philosophical tradition associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein [1] and the “ordinary language philosophers,” such as Norman Malcolm [2] and, more recently, Bennett and Hacker [3]. Many of the central arguments for the view can be traced back further to Thomas Reid’s 18th century common-sense psychology [4]. The attraction of this tradition is that it promises to dissolve (rather than solve) our problems about the relationship between the mind and the brain. The apparent problems arise only because we (21st century philosophers and neuroscientists) are confused about how person-level phenomena such as beliefs, knowledge, inference, and reason are related to the activities in our brains. In the brain, one finds causes, not inferences. One finds patterns of neural activity, not knowledge. One finds reflexes, not reasons for acting. To relabel these neural phenomena as inferences, knowledge, and reasons is to commit a cate
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