Abstract
Critics of neuroscientific developments in psychology have emphasized the reductionist impulse underlying these advances and their adherence to a mereological fallacy wherein powers are attributed to brains when these can only be ascribed to persons as a whole. These critiques among others, while important, miss the crucial features of a neuroscience that will alter our understanding of both human complexity and the emergence of our most characteristic attributes. Following Rose and Abi-Rached, the picture of our brain as plastic and ultimately social is a revisionist one. This chapter argues that rather than creating a sharp division between a reductionist technoscience on the one hand, and a militant subjectivity on the other, the brain question makes possible the articulation of multiple frames. A technoscience stance asks that what there is to know of the brain is neither to be feared as reductionist nor limiting for subjectivities but instead melds into new forms of theorizing. I do this by converting Solymosi’s (and Dennett’s) conception of “ethical first aid” to the construct of an “epistemological first aid” that sets out an ersatz manual for understanding the place of the neurosciences in our activities of theorizing.
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Notes
- 1.
Solymosi is here referring to Larry Hickman, who argues that technoscience is the more appropriate term for what is nominally called “science” since it is in fact a branch of technology that involves the use of tools and artifacts that are employed on raw materials to solve problems (see Hickman, 2001). Science does no more come before technology than it is separate from it. Techoscience is on this account continuous with human experience.
- 2.
This is actually controversial, like so many findings in social psychology. The results of multiple studies have complicated the original findings and there is no overall theoretical model to give an account of the findings that are reported (Fischer et al., 2011). However, the results of these studies have become embedded in the discourse of “bystanders” in North America. For example, my university offers training to faculty and students in “bystander intervention.” I say this not to critique such training, which undoubtedly is useful for some ends, but to note how the notion of the inactive bystander has become a common trope.
- 3.
It could be argued of course that there was no such thing as the “bystander effect” in the nineteenth century because the historical, urban conditions of alienation that led to this effect were not yet fully present. Hence no phrenological account could be provided.
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Stam, H.J. (2019). Neuroscience and the New Psychologies: Epistemological First Aid. In: O’Doherty, K.C., Osbeck, L.M., Schraube, E., Yen, J. (eds) Psychological Studies of Science and Technology. Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25308-0_4
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