Jan Slaby

Critical Neuroscience: Linking Neuroscience and Society through Critical Practice

We outline the framework of the new project of Critical Neuroscience: a reflexive scientific practice that responds to the social, cultural and political challenges posed by the advances in the behavioural and brain sciences. Indeed, the new advances in neuroscience have given rise to growing projects of the sociology of neuroscience as well as neuroethics. In parallel, however, there is also a growing gulf between social studies of neuroscience and empirical neuroscience itself. This is where Critical Neuroscience finds its place. Here, we begin with a sketch of several forms of critique that can contribute to developing a model of critical scientific practice. We then describe a set of core activities that jointly make up the practice of Critical Neuroscience as it can be applied and practised both within and outside of neuroscience. We go on to propose three possible areas of application: (1) the problems related to new possibilities of neuropharmacological interventions; (2) the importance of culture, and the problems of reductionism, in psychiatry; (3) the use of imaging data from neuroscience in the law as alleged evidence about ‘human nature’.

Critical neuroscience : a handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience

About the editors. About the contributors. Preface. Introduction: Critical Neuroscience: Between Lifeworld and Laboratory (Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby). Part I Motivations and Foundations. Chapter 1: Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience(Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury). Chapter 2: The Need for a Critical Neuroscience. From Neuroideology to Neurotechnology (Steven Rose). Chapter 3: Against First Nature. Critical Theory and Neuroscience (Martin Hartmann). Chapter 4: Scanning the Lifeworld: Toward a Critical Neuroscience of Action and Interaction (Shaun Gallagher). Part II Histories of the Brain. Chapter 5: Toys are Us. Models and Metaphors in Brain Science (Cornelius Borck). Chapter 6: The Neuromance of Cerebral History(Max Stadler). Chapter 7: Empathic Cruelty and the Origins of the Social Brain(Allan Young). Part III Neuroscience in Context: From Laboratory to Lifeworld. Chapter 8: Disrupting Images: Neuroscientific representations in the lives of psychiatric patients (Simon Cohn). Chapter 9: Critically Producing Brain Images of Mind(Joseph Dumit). Chapter 10: Radical Reductions. Neurophysiology, Politics, and Personhood in Russian Addiction Medicine(Eugene Raikhel). Chapter 11: Delirious Brain Chemistry and Controlled Culture: Exploring the Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects (Nicolas Langlitz). Part IV Situating the brain in context: from lifeworld back to laboratory? Chapter 12: Critical Neuroscience: From Neuroimaging to Tea Leaves in the Bottom of a Cup (Amir Raz). Chapter 13: The Salmon of Doubt: Six Months of Methodological Controversy within Social Neuroscience(Daniel Margulies). Chapter 14: Cultural Neuroscience as Critical Neuroscience in Practice(Joan Y. Chiao and Bobby K. Cheon). Part V Beyond neural correlates: Ecological approaches to psychiatry. Chapter 15: Re-Socializing Psychiatry: Critical Neuroscience and the Limits of Reductionism(Laurence J. Kirmayer and Ian Gold). Chapter 16: Are Mental Illnesses Diseases of the Brain?(Thomas Fuchs). Chapter 17: Are there neural correlates of depression?(Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega). Chapter 18: The Future of Critical Neuroscience (Laurence J. Kirmayer).

The brain as part of an enactive system.

The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational-representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limited ways, eyes structured to focus, an autonomic system, an upright posture, etc. coping with specific kinds of environments, and with other people. Changes to any of the bodily, environmental, or intersubjective conditions elicit responses from the system as a whole. On this view, rather than representing or computing information, the brain is better conceived as participating in the action.

Proposal for a critical neuroscience

We outline the perspective of ‘critical neuroscience’: a stance of informed critique pertaining to neuroscientific methods, research practices, concepts, discursive effects, formative backstories and societal impacts. We bring together work from various disciplines with the aim to engage neuroscience practitioners as well as decision-makers, stakeholders and the public. Critical neuroscience is a critical stance towards the entirety of the ‘Neuro complex’ in its present guise, including its broader impacts on scholarship, academia and the wider society. The text is a programmatic outline tracing major lines of influence and theoretical backgrounds. It is an invitation to neuroscientists and critical scholars from different fields to engage in collaborative reflection on the present and future of human neuroscience.

Empathy's blind spot

The aim of this paper is to mount a philosophical challenge to the currently highly visible research and discourse on empathy. The notion of empathetic perspective-shifting—a conceptually demanding, high-level construal of empathy in humans that arguably captures the core meaning of the term—is criticized from the standpoint of a philosophy of normatively accountable agency. Empathy in this demanding sense fails to achieve a true understanding of the other and instead risks to impose the empathizer’s self-constitutive agency upon the person empathized with. Attempts to ‘simulate’ human agency, or attempts to emulate its cognitive or emotional basis, will likely distort their target phenomena in profound ways. Thus, agency turns out to be empathy’s blind spot. Elements of an alternative understanding of interpersonal relatedness are also discussed, focusing on aspects of ‘interaction theory’. These might do some of the work that high-level constructs of empathy had been supposed to do without running into similar conceptual difficulties.

Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds

The concept of a socially extended mind suggests that our cognitive processes are extended not simply by the various tools and technologies we use, but by other minds in our intersubjective interactions and, more systematically, by institutions that, like tools and technologies, enable and sometimes constitute our cognitive processes. In this article we explore the potential of this concept to facilitate the development of a critical neuroscience. We explicate the concept of cognitive institution and suggest that science itself is a good example. Science, through various practices and rules, shapes our cognitive activity so as to constitute a certain type of knowledge, packaged with relevant skills and techniques. To develop this example, we focus on neuroscience, its cultural impact, and the various institutional entanglements that complicate its influence on reframing conceptions of self and subjectivity, and on defining what questions count as important and what kind of answers will be valued.

Affective Self-Construal and the Sense of Ability:

How should we construe the unity, in affective experience, of felt bodily changes on the one hand and intentionality on the other, without forcing affective phenomena into a one-sided theoretical framework such as cognitivism? To answer this question, I will consider the specific kind of self-awareness implicit in affectivity. In particular, I will explore the idea that a bodily sense of ability is crucial for affective self-awareness. Describing the affective ways of “grasping oneself” manifest in a person’s felt sense of ability will help us understand the intimate connection between bodily feelings and intentionality in affective processes. In order to illustrate these experiential structures in a concrete case, I will discuss experiential changes often reported by sufferers of depression.

Critical neuroscience meets medical humanities

This programmatic theory paper sketches a conceptual framework that might inspire work in critical Medical Humanities. For this purpose, Kaushik Sunder Rajans account of biocapital is revisited and discussed in relation to the perspective of a critical neuroscience. Critical neuroscience is an encompassing positioning towards the recent public prominence of the brain and brain-related practices, tools and discourses. The proposed analytical scheme has five focal nodes: capital, life, technoscience, (neoliberal) politics and subjectivity. A special emphasis will be placed on contemporary framings of subjectivity, as it is here where deep-reaching entanglements of personhood with scientific practice and discourse, medical and informational technologies, and economic formations are most evident. Notably, the emerging subject position of the ‘prospective health consumer’ will be discussed as it figures prominently in the terrain between neuroscience and other medico-scientific disciplines.

Emotional Rationality and Feelings of Being

This paper undertakes a comparison and theoretical unification of two recently proposed philosophical accounts of human affectivity: Bennett Helm’s theory of felt evaluations, centered on the idea of a sui generis emotional rationality as the standard of intelligibility of affective evaluation, and Matthew Ratcliffe’s phenomenological account of existential feelings (or ‘feelings of being’), which are encompassing affective background structures that comprise the foundation of all sorts of directed experiences – crucially including emotional and cognitive states. While these two proposals seem – at least on the surface – to focus on radically different aspects of our emotional lives, I will argue that they can (and should) be reconciled. While Helm is right in stressing and elaborating the intricate networks of emotional intelligibility, his approach needs to be supplemented by an understanding of affective background structures which form the indispensable starting conditions of an individual’s evaluative perspective on the world. Only a consideration of these affective backgrounds will give us the information needed to adequately reconstruct and assess an individual’s emotional evaluations as well as the evaluative judgments based upon them. Thus, overall this paper works towards a philosophical synthesis so far rarely achieved. An analytical, rationality-based approach to the normative structure of human forms of life (Helm) is brought into fruitful alignment with the descriptively rich accounts of human experience offered by the phenomenological tradition (Ratcliffe). These two approaches are shown to converge in their underlying aim: To outline the contours of a descriptive metaphysics of personhood and to stress the importance and indispensability of affectivity.

Affectivity and Temporality in Heidegger

Heidegger’s conception of affectivity, as developed for the most part in Being and Time, is reconstructed here with an emphasis on the temporal character of affectivity. While a good number of philosophers of emotion have borrowed from Heidegger’s approach, few have so far taken the temporal character of findingness [Befindlichkeit] into account. This paper has three main parts. The first part revisits the standard reading of Heideggerian affectivity, the second reconstructs the conception of ‘originary temporality’ at the core of Division II of Being and Time, while the third section undertakes an interpretation of the way Heidegger construes affectivity as various modes of the ‘ecstatic temporalizing of Dasein’. The main orientation of the paper is reconstructive. However, some implications for the philosophical study of emotion will be highlighted in the conclusion.