Pragmatism and the Search for Coherence in Neuroscience (PDF)

Jay Schulkin is Research Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University, USA, where his work on brain systems that underlie behavioral adaptation is informed by both neuroscience and philosophical perspectives.

Pragmatism is a philosophic theory about the thought-directed actions that engage us with other people and things. The theory has several versions. Some resemble phenomenological studies of meanings, values, and 'the way the world looks to me.' Jay Schulkin's version is the realist theory of C.S. Peirce. It affirms that reality has a decided character, one discovered as we engage it for purposes of our own. Schulkin supposes that knowledge is representational and adaptive: our aims and interests are blunted if we don't adapt to situations and opportunities at hand. Pragmatists of this sort emphasize the personal quest for coherence throughout a range of interests: in perception, thought, meaning, action, intention, and with partners. Why this emphasis? Because incoherence may be evidence of misperception, misconception, miscalculation, or social conflict. Initiatives are more likely to be successful if there is coherence in these dimensions.

Pragmatism has been committed to empirical inquiry, and to the social character of inquiry since Peirce emphasized community in his description of scientists who challenge one another while working together. Pragmatists construed Darwin's theory of evolution as evidence that responsibility for intelligent adaptation is mind's principal role: we don't survive to reproduce without it. There was, however, one large void in the pragmatists' armor. They, like Aristotle, emphasized thought but knew little or nothing of its material basis. Where Aristotle wrote of 'capacities,' the pragmatists emphasized 'habit.' This seemed a weak reed, a place marker for entities that were inferred but otherwise unknown. Sparrows might evolve, but there was philosophic consensus that mind's structure and activity were best understood in the static terms of Descartes or Kant. Jay Schulkin's book describes the recent history of the neurologists and physiologists who transformed this conception of mind. We 'rummage for coherence,' he writes.