Abstract
In the current advent of technological innovation allowing for precise neural manipulations and copious data collection, it is hardly questioned that the explanation of behavioral processes is to be chiefly found in neural circuits. Such belief, rooted in the exhausted dualism of cause and effect, is enacted by a methodology that promotes “necessity and sufficiency” claims as the goal-standard in neuroscience, thus instructing young students on what shall reckon as explanation. Here I wish to deconstruct and explicate the difference between what is done, what is said, and what is meant by such causal circuit explanations of behavior. Well-known to most philosophers, yet ignored or at least hardly ever made explicit by neuroscientists, the original grand claim of “understanding the brain” is imperceptibly substituted by the methodologically sophisticated task of empirically establishing counterfactual dependencies. But for the twenty-first century neuroscientist, after so much pride, this is really an excess of humility. I argue that to upgrade intervention to explanation is prone to logical fallacies, interpretational leaps and carries a weak explanatory force, thus settling and maintaining low standards for intelligibility in neuroscience. To claim that behavior is explained by a “necessary and sufficient” neural circuit is, at best, misleading. In that, my critique (rather than criticism) is indeed mainly negative. Positively, I briefly suggest some available alternatives for conceptual progress, such as adopting circular causality (rather than lineal causality in the flavor of top-down reductionism), searching for principles of behavior (rather than taking an arbitrary definition of behavior and rushing to dissect its “underlying” neural mechanisms), and embracing process philosophy (rather than substance-mechanistic ontologies). Overall, if the goal of neuroscience is to understand the relation between brain and behavior then, in addition to excruciating neural studies (one pillar), we will need a strong theory of behavior (the other pillar) and a solid foundation to establish their relation (the bridge).
There are empirical methods and conceptual confusions.
Our training and core practices concern research methods;
The discipline is and always has been deeply skeptical of philosophy.
We emphasize methods for the verification of hypotheses and
Minimize the analysis of the concepts entailed by the hypotheses. (…)
All the empiricism in the world can’t salvage a bad idea.
(Hogan 2001).
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Notes
- 1.
More generally, to explain is to substitute fact by abstraction. The notion of causality is a vast topic, and this is not the place to try to give a complete account. It is of interest to briefly note that it has been claimed that «in advanced sciences (…) the word ‘cause’ never occurs» (Russell 1913). Indeed, modern physics has succeeded by finding laws (quantitative invariant relations of variables) rather than causes (chains of antecedent–consequent events).
- 2.
«Teleology has been discredited chiefly because it was defined to imply a cause subsequent in time to a given effect. When this aspect of teleology was dismissed, however, the associated recognition of the importance of purpose was also unfortunately discarded. Since we consider purposefulness a concept necessary for the understanding of certain modes of behavior we suggest that a teleological study is useful if it avoids problems of causality and concerns itself merely with an investigation of purpose.» (Rosenblueth et al. 1943).
- 3.
Causality need not be equated with necessary connection: «It can grant that there are situations in which, given the initial conditions and no interference, only one result will accord with the laws of nature; but it will not see general reason, in advance of discovery, to suppose that any given course of things has been so determined. So it may grant that in many cases difference of issue can rightly convince us of a relevant difference of circumstances; but it will deny that, quite generally, this must be so.» (Anscombe 1971). Put plainly: «not being determined does not imply not being caused.» (ibid).
- 4.
«We suggest that in many cases in biology, the causal link might be bidirectional: A causes B through a fast-acting physiological process, while B causes A through a slowly accumulating evolutionary process. Furthermore, many trained biologists tend to consistently focus at first on the fast-acting direction, and overlook the slower process in the opposite direction. (…) While A is a proximate cause of B, B may have prevailed even before A, and may have ultimately affected A. So why is the reasoning of many biologists seemingly more prone to focus at first on the effect acting on the short-term, physiological time scale explanation and not on the processes that take millions of years to manifest themselves? Is it because of the biologists’ training?» (Karmon and Pilpel 2016).
- 5.
«Huxley likes to speak of “the three major problems of Biology”: that of causation, that of survival value, and that of evolution—to which I should like to add a fourth, that of ontogeny» (Tinbergen 1963) or «behavior is part and parcel of the adaptive equipment of animals; that, as such, its short-term causation can be studied in fundamentally the same way as that of other life processes; that its survival value can be studied just as systematically as its causation; that the study of its ontogeny is similar to that of the ontogeny of structure; and that the study of its evolution likewise follows the same lines as that of evolution of form.» (ibid).
- 6.
«It is now time to ask about its phylogenetic origins. Not because an historical explanation could replace the efficient causes of dynamics, but in order to see how these dynamics came to be actualised.» (Kortmulder 1998, p. 123).
- 7.
«precisely on the condition of limiting oneself strictly to the identity or difference of responses in the presence of such and such given stimuli» (Merleau-Ponty 1942, p. 183).
- 8.
«Are we not brought back to the classical problems which behaviorism tried to eliminate by leveling behavior to the unique plane of physical causality?» (ibid, p. 131).
- 9.
«If we look far into the future of our science, what will it mean to say we ‘understand’ the mechanism of behavior? The obvious answer is what may be called the neurophysiologist’s nirvana: the complete wiring diagram of the nervous system of a species, every synapse labeled as excitatory or inhibitory; presumably, also a graph, for each axon, of nerve impulses as a function of time during the course of each behavior pattern. This ideal is the logical end point of much contemporary neuroanatomical and neurophysiological endeavor, and because we are still in the early stages, the ultimate conclusion does not worry us. But it would not constitute understanding of how behavior works in any real sense at all. No man could hold such a mass of detail in his head. Real understanding will only come from distillation of general principles at a higher level, to parallel for example the great principles of genetics— particulate inheritance, continuity of germ-line and non-inheritance of acquired characteristics, dominance, linkage, mutation, and so on. Of course neurophysiology has been discovering principles for a long time, the all-or-none nerve impulse, temporal and spatial summation and other synaptic properties, y-efferent servo-control and so on. But it seems possible that at higher levels some important principles may be anticipated from behavioral evidence alone. The major principles of genetics were all inferred from external evidence long before the internal molecular structure of the gene was even seriously thought about.» (Dawkins 1976).
- 10.
«If thou examinest a man having a smash of his skull, under the skin of his head, while there is nothing at all upon it, thou shouldst palpate his wound. Shouldst thou find that there is a swelling protruding on the out side of that smash which is in his skull, while his eye is askew because of it, on the side of him having that injury which is in his skull; (and) he walks shuffling with his sole, on the side of him having that injury which is in his skull.» (The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus 1930).
- 11.
See Galileo’s definition of cause in Bunge (2009, p. 33).
- 12.
«statements of necessity and sufficiency are not fundamental truths about neural mechanisms, but rather are interpretations of experimental outcomes» (DiDomenico and Eaton 1988).
- 13.
«Now “sufficient condition” is a term of art whose users may therefore lay down its meaning as they please. So they are in their rights to rule out the query: “May not the sufficient conditions of an event be present, and the event yet not take place?” For “sufficient condition” is so used that if the sufficient conditions for X are there, X occurs. But at the same time, the phrase cozens the understanding into not noticing an assumption. For “sufficient condition” sounds like: “enough.” One can ask: “May there not be enough to have made something happen—and yet it not have happened?”» (Anscombe 1971).
- 14.
Causal accounts reflect the notion of liability in court: “the judge decides that an individual is liable to a certain amount for an action he has caused.”
- 15.
«the lights went on when Mrs. Smith turned the switch (…). It is evident that the statements are all singular, rather than general or lawlike. Moreover, in none of them is the occurrence tacitly assumed to be “the cause” a sufficient condition for the event alleged to be its effect. For example, turning a switch does not suffice to produce illumination, since many other conditions must be satisfied for this to happen. In making such causal statements, it is, of course, possible that we know what these further conditions are, and take them for granted without mentioning them explicitly; but this is rarely the case, and we are usually able to cite only a few of these conditions, without knowing all of them. In either case, what we are doing is designating as the cause of an event just one item, selected from what is tacitly supposed to be its full complement of necessary and sufficient conditions, because the item is deemed important for various reasons.» (Nagel 1965).
- 16.
An interesting caveat—revealing an arbitrary preference for a particular level of organization and working in conjunction with a reduced notion of causality—is the following: if circuit activation is said to produce the behavior of the animal, it could also be said that the behavior of the scientist has produced the animal’s circuit activation in the first place, or «[a]t most it would show that experience could be produced by means of interaction between a probing scientist and a healthy animal. We haven't yet imagined a case in which experience emerges from the causal effects of neural activity alone» (Noë 2004, p. 211).
- 17.
«other factors, without which the event would not occur, are all assumed to be constant and given.» (Eaton and DiDomenico 1985).
- 18.
«although in the sense of “cause” under discussion the cause of an event is a necessary (or indispensable) condition for its occurrence, the necessity may be only relative. (…) there may be more than one set of sufficient conditions for an event’s occurrence (…). Accordingly, in the sense of “cause” under discussion, the cause of an event is in general neither a sufficient nor an absolutely necessary condition for the event’s occurrence. The cause may be called a “contingently necessary” condition» (Nagel 1965).
- 19.
«There is something in the context of the experiment which goes beyond the stimuli and responses directly found within it. There is, for example, the problem which the experimenter has set and his deliberate arrangement of apparatus and selection of conditions with a view to disclosure of facts that bear upon it. There is also an intent on the part of the subject. Now I am not making this reference to “problem,” “selective arrangement” and “intent” or purpose in order to drag in by the heels something mental over and beyond the behavior. The object is rather to call attention to a definite characteristic of behavior, namely, that it is not exhausted in the immediate stimuli-response features of the experimentation.» (Dewey 1930).
- 20.
«The point I want to stress is that we seldom have enough information to state explicitly the full set of sufficient conditions for the occurrence of concrete events. The most we can hope to accomplish in such situations is to state what are the best only “important” indispensable conditions, such that if they are realized the occurrence of the designated events is made “probable;” and we thereby take for granted that the remaining conditions essential for the occurrence of the events are also realized, even when we do not know what those remaining conditions are.» (Nagel 1965).
- 21.
«They realize that if you take a case of cause and effect, and relevantly describe the cause A and the effect B, and then construct a universal proposition, “Always, given A, a B follows,” you usually would not get anything true. You have got to describe the absence of circumstances in which A would not cause a B. But the task of excluding all such circumstances can not be carried out.» (Anscombe 1971).
- 22.
«Instead of asking how a particular experimental manipulation alters the subsequent behavior of an organism, one might instead ask how an experimental manipulation alters the parameters of the system. This is a subtly different question, but the difference is important, and requires that the parameters of the system be understood to begin with. Understanding what variables organisms may be controlling necessitates that organisms be understood on their own terms before they are used as model systems to answer larger questions.» (Bell 2014).
- 23.
«We argue that the analysis of this simple system implies that we should be far more humble at interpreting results from neural data analysis. It also suggests that the availability of unlimited data, as we have for the processor, is in no way sufficient to allow a real understanding of the brain.» (Jonas and Kording 2016).
- 24.
«the rule “collect truth for truth’s sake” may be justified when the truth is unchanging; but when the system is not completely isolated from its surroundings, and is undergoing secular changes, the collection of truth is futile, for it will not keep.» (Ashby 1958).
- 25.
«Behavior, as a relation between a living system operating as a whole and the medium operating as an independent entity, does not take place in the anatomy/physiological domain of the organism, but depends on it. (…) the behavior that a living system exhibits is neither determined by it nor by the medium alone, even when a particular structural change in a living system may specifically interfere with its ability to generate a particular behavior» (Maturana 1995).
- 26.
«To understand what this flaw is, I decided to follow the advice of my high school mathematics teacher, who recommended testing an approach by applying it to a problem that has a known solution. (…) I started to contemplate how biologists would determine why my radio does not work and how they would attempt to repair it.» (Lazebnik 2002).
- 27.
«An explanation is the proposition of a generative mechanism or process which, if allowed to operate, gives rise, as a result of its operation, to the experience to be explained.» (Maturana 1995).
- 28.
«If a biologist or another scientists is interested in control or manipulation, and many of them are, then this is an epistemic goal for that biologist doing science. It is an important goal, and it is important to learn how to intervene and manipulate in experimental settings. Much scientific training and subsequent practice involves pursuing that goal. Having these as goals for one's science and scientific practice is not the same as finding a mechanism nor is it the same as explaining things by mechanisms. In fact, controlling is not explaining at all.» (Machamer 2004).
- 29.
«Its first characteristic is that its ultimate aim is not understanding but the purely practical one of control. If a system is too complex to be understood, it may nevertheless still be controllable. For to achieve this, all that the controller wants to find is some action that gives an acceptable result; he is concerned only with what happens, not with why it happens. Often, no matter how complex the system, what the controller wants is comparatively simple: has the patient recovered? —have the profits gone up or down? —has the number of strikes gone up or down?» (Ashby 1958).
- 30.
«This operational approach excludes alternative methodologies because the N&S causal definition is the same as the methodology for its own demonstration.» (DiDomenico and Eaton 1988).
- 31.
«the methodological connection to behavior is undefined since the Command Neuron Experiment allows virtually any phenomenon to be used as “behavior”» (ibid).
- 32.
A biologist friend of mine once told me:“what I care about is to pin down the genes of a behavior, behavior being anything I can put a number so that it will allow me to get to my genes.” Replace genes (or gene networks) with neurons (or neural circuits) and the punch-line is the same: behavior as a pretext for genetic and neural manipulations in the age of technocratic science.
- 33.
«The scientist cannot make the rejoinder here that he thinks without ontological background. To believe that one is not doing metaphysics or to want to abstain from doing it is always to imply an ontology, but an unexamined one —just as governments run by “technicians” do not make political policy, but never fail to have one— and often the worst of all.» (De Waelhens 1942).
- 34.
«this is no doubt due to practical preoccupations and notably to a representation of productivity and labor in terms of scale. The more masons work, the higher the building rises. The more copyists copy, the longer their copy becomes. Fabricating labor is the only labor in which the amplification of the product is quantitatively, spatially proportional to the progress of action. (…) A technician’s and artisan’s thought willingly concentrates on this demiurgic elaboration of the indeterminate.» (Jankélévitch 2015 p. 168).
- 35.
The belief that «[s]cientific discovery, or the formulation of scientific theory, starts in with the untarnished and unembroidered evidence of the senses. It starts with simple observation —simple, unbiased, unprejudiced, naive, or innocent observation—and out of this sensory evidence, embodied in the form of simple propositions or declarations of fact, generalizations will grow up and take shape, almost as if some process of crystalization or condensation were taking place. Out of a disorderly array of facts, an orderly theory, an orderly general statement, will somehow emerge» (Medawar 1978).
- 36.
«The belief underlying Mass Observation was apparently this: that if one could only record and set down the actual raw facts about what people do and what people say in pubs, in trains, when they make love to each other, when they are playing games, and so on, then somehow, from this wealth of information, a great generalization would inevitably emerge. Well, in point of fact, nothing important emerged from this approach. (…) [T]he starting point of induction is philosophic fiction. There is no such thing as unprejudiced observation. Every act of observation we make is biased. What we see or otherwise sense is a function of what we have seen or sensed in the past. The second point is this: Scientific discovery or the formulation of the scientific idea on the one hand, and demonstration or proof on the other hand, are two entirely different notions.» (ibid).
- 37.
«In the use of language, for instance, we depend on the fact that names have been given to objects, qualities, and relations, which fix certain similarities and differences in the flow of experience as boundaries containing it, dividing it, directing it. Whenever we describe, we class things or properties or events together or apart on the basis of the similarities and differences marked by the words we choose. Consequently, to the extent that science begins with description, it begins with comparison. But no two things, no two qualities, no two events are alike in all respects, or alike in none. Any description singles out some similarities and differences to the exclusion of others, which could be the basis of alternative descriptions. Consequently, a demand for a complete description of anything amounts to a contradiction in terms. A demand for a pure description would be equally incoherent, for, of necessity, the similarities and differences that we pick out when we describe anything will depend on what we intend the description for, our expectations about the matter in question, considerations of relevance to some focus of interest, and other prior assumptions. Comparison necessarily assumes perspective.» (Beer 1980).
- 38.
«While often explicitly denying the relevance of philosophy to its operations, psychology has implicitly used the philosophical assumptions of a seventeenth-century ontological dualism, a nineteenth-century epistemological empiricism, and an early twentieth-century neopositivism, to build a standard orthodox approach to the resolution of the antinomies. (…) the product of the acceptance of some basic ontological and epistemological —hence philosophical—assumptions. These assumptions begin with the idea of splitting reason from observation, and follow with the epistemological notion that knowledge and, indeed, reason itself originates in observation and only observation. These assumptions then lead to a particular definition of scientific method as entailing observation, causation, and induction–deduction, and only observation, causation, and induction–deduction. Sometimes, the split is found in explicit and implicit attacks on theory, as in a particular rhetoric that states that all theories must be induced directly from observations (i.e., must be “data based” or “data driven”). It is also found in a dogmatic retort given to any reflective critique —“that’s just philosophy.”» (Overton 2006).
- 39.
«until about 1925, the rule “vary only one factor at a time” was regarded as the very touchstone of the scientific method.» (Ashby 1958).
- 40.
«What we have is a circuit, not an arc or broken segment of a circle. This circuit is more truly termed organic than reflex, because the motor response determines the stimulus, just as truly as sensory stimulus determines the movement.» (Dewey 1896, p. 363).
- 41.
«If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants Juliet as filings want a magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves toward her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the [obstructing] card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed; the path may be modified indefinitely.» (James 1890, p. 6).
- 42.
«A profound difference between most inanimate and living systems can be expressed by the concept of equifinality» (Von Bertalanffy 1950).
- 43.
Amongst the most used verbs we find: “involves, reflects, reveals, mediates, is associated with, contributes to, shapes, modulates, alters, regulates, drives, determines, generates, produces, encodes, underlies, induces, enables, ensures, supports, promotes, suppresses, inhibits, prevents, disrupts, controls, and causes.” The pet expression is perhaps “X plays a role in Y,” or “The role of X in Y.” Certainly, lack of coffee “plays a role” in my writing of this piece, and gravity “mediates” the mouse escape from the paws of the cat.
- 44.
«But it is not sufficient to oppose a description to reductive explanations since the latter could always challenge these descriptive characteristics of human action as being only apparent. It would be necessary to bring to light the abuse of causal thinking in explanatory theories and at the same time to show positively how the physiological and sociological dependencies which they rightly take into account ought to be conceived.» (Merleau-Ponty 1942, p. 176).
- 45.
«In describing the physical or organic individual and its milieu, we have been led to accept the fact that their relations were not mechanical, but dialectical. A mechanical action, whether the word is taken in a restricted or looser sense, is one in which the cause and the effect are decomposable into real elements which have a one-to-one correspondence. In elementary actions, the dependence is unidirectional; the cause is the necessary and sufficient condition of the effect considered in its existence and its nature; and, even when one speaks of reciprocal action between two terms, it can be reduced to a series of unidirectional determinations. On the contrary, as we have seen, physical stimuli act upon the organism only by eliciting a global response which will vary qualitatively when the stimuli vary quantitatively; which respect to the organism they play the role of occasions rather than of cause; the reaction depends on their vital significance rather than on the material properties of the stimuli. Hence, between the variables upon which conduct actually depends and this conduct itself there appears a relation of meaning, an intrinsic relation. Once cannot assign a moment in which the world acts on the organisms, since the very effect of this “action” expresses the internal law of the organism.» (Merleau-Ponty 1942, p. 160).
- 46.
«Ktesibios’s water clock required a steady, unvarying flow of water to measure accurately the steady, unvarying flow of time. But because water flows more quickly from a full container and more slowly when it is less full, Ktesibios had to devise a way to keep the vessel at a constant level while water was flowing from it into the clock mechanism. As he did this in a manner not unlike that of the modern flush toilet to which it is assumed the reader has handy access, I will use this more modern invention instead of the water clock as our first example of a feedback-control device.» (Cziko 2000).
- 47.
«When you learn to see behavior in terms of relationships among variables instead of causal connections between one event and another, you can see invariance where formerly you could see only specific causal connections. You can see that when someone builds a fire in the fireplace, two people may show “the same behavior,” even though one of them takes off a sweater while another opens a window.» (Powers 1998).
- 48.
«I would say that a system is teleological if it has a mechanism which enables it to maintain a specific property despite environmental changes. (…) It must have certain types of compensating mechanisms — what we call essentially a negative feedback. (…) I would not say that a simple pendulum which moves in such a way that it strives to achieve the lowest potential energy is a teleological system. There are no compensating effects in the pendulum. Hence, as a system, it does not have an internal structure that enables it to compensate for environmental changes.» (Nagel 1965).
- 49.
«rather than concentrating on what an animal is doing, what may be more relevant is what the animal is trying to perceive. This double inversion (from the experimenter’s point of view to the animal’s and from action to perception) has three potentially critical implications for the study of cognition: first, motor output is a side effect of perceptual control and therefore quantitative data collection data is insufficient by itself, second, averaging across individuals may smear out control variables, and third, restrained experimental setups may not let animals control the relevant inputs; freedom in the requisite dimensions is essential. In short, control (circular causality) and subjectivity (animal centrism) may be essential ingredients in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience.» (Gomez-Marin and Mainen 2016).
- 50.
«Could not the application of physico-chemical methods possibly mean, in principle, such a destruction of the organism… Can it really teach us something about the functioning of the organism?”» (Goldstein 1934, p. 109).
- 51.
«five essentially different classes of top-down influence can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many real-world examples. They are: algorithmic top-down causation; top-down causation via nonadaptive information control, top-down causation via adaptive selection, top-down causation via adaptive information control and intelligent top-down causation.» (Ellis 2011).
- 52.
«We have a general manipulative technique for making anything hot: we put it on a fire.» (Von Wright 1971).
- 53.
«The real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking and not a sensation of light. (…) In other words, we now have an enlarged and transformed coordination; the act is seeing no less than before, but it is now seeing-for-reaching purposes. There is still a sensori-motor circuit, one with more content or value, not a substitution of a motor response for a sensory stimulus. (…) it is a seeing-of-a-light-that-means-pain-when-contact-occurs.» (Dewey 1896).
- 54.
«In relation to each other inside the act of attention, most discussions of the subject appear to make the ear process merely a stimulus to which the hand adjustment is merely a response. But the question arises, What holds the ear to its work? Why does the reagent maintain his listening attitude? It may be replied that it is ‘because he is told to. “But he is not told to listen any more than he is told to move his hand. If the telling suffices in one case it should in the other. Moreover, he is not merely to listen, or even to listen just for the click, but to listen for the click as a pressure signal. It is this character of the click as a signal for pressure that keeps up the interest in it and the attention to it. (…) The hand therefore is stimuli as well as response to the ear, and the latter is response as well as stimulus to the hand. Each is both stimulus and response to the other. The distinction of stimulus and response is therefore not one of content, the stimulus being identified with the ear, the response with the hand, but one of function, and both offices belong equally to each organ. (…) it must be kept in mind that this latter is a distinction falling inside the act, not between the hand movement considered as the act, and the sound considered as its external stimulus or “cause.” In a word, the reagent reacts as much with his ear as he does with his hand.” (Angell and Moore 1896, p. 252).
- 55.
«The concrescence of each individual actual entity is internally determined and is externally free». More explicitly: «The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence (…) beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause.» (Whitehead 1929, p. 47).
- 56.
«Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set up to finish or termination conditions» (Machamer, Darden and Craver 2000).
- 57.
«We meant thereby to distinguish our position, or way of thinking, from a substance ontology and from process ontology, and we chose “entity” and “activity” because these terms seemed to carry fewer historical and philosophical presuppositions than “substance” and “process.”» (Machamer 2004).
- 58.
«Process philosophers would have us redefine all entities in terms of combining processes, but this seems a bit too strange. Therefore, we (MDC 2000) decided to be dualist.» (ibid).
- 59.
And this shall include, together with theory, the appreciation for descriptive science:«Simply describing what we see is not considered very scientific nowadays and ‘descriptive science’ has become a derogatory term. We must have a hypothesis to test, or better, a controlled experiment that can be performed to identify ecological rules and laws. However, if “ecological rules” were followed by all systems, unexpected things would not happen, which is evidently not the case. Deviations from rules are the main determinants of history, but we cannot test something that is unexpected. As such, our quest to identify rules and regularities could be preventing us from understanding the history of these systems. Paradoxically, we aim at understanding historical systems while using ahistorical approaches! We need a means of reporting these contingencies so that we can better understand the historical trajectory of ecological systems.» (Boero 2013).
- 60.
«Both the criteria of plausibility and of scientific value tend to enforce conformity, while the value attached to originality encourages dissent. This internal tension is essential in guiding and motivating scientific work. The professional standards of science must impose a framework of discipline and at the same time encourage rebellion against it. They must demand that, in order to be taken seriously, an investigation should largely conform to the currently predominant beliefs about the nature of things, while allowing that in order to be original it may to some extent go against these.» (Polanyi 1962).
- 61.
«Science is impelled by two main factors, technological advance and a guiding vision. A properly balanced relationship between the two is key to the successful development of a science: without the proper technological advances the road ahead is blocked. Without a guiding vision there is no road ahead; the science becomes an engineering discipline, concerned with temporal practical problems.» (Woese 2004).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Björn Brembs, André Brown, Adam Calhoun, Udi Fonio, Asif Ghazanfar, José Gomes Pinto, Gordon Globus, Eyal Gruntman, Rod Hemsell, Johannes Jaeger, Konrad Kording, Gonçalo Lopes, Adam Matic, Laura Navío, Joana Rigato, Troy Shirangi, and Ibrahim Tastekin, for feedback. My views need not coincide with theirs.
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Gomez-Marin, A. (2017). Causal Circuit Explanations of Behavior: Are Necessity and Sufficiency Necessary and Sufficient?. In: Çelik, A., Wernet, M. (eds) Decoding Neural Circuit Structure and Function. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57363-2_11
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