CPS Lunch Forum: Hilde Teigen

Contemporary neuroscience is changing in a way that should encourage a change in what is considered appropriate explanations in the field. I will defend a view that the emerging “population doctrine” and it’s accompanying concepts represents a move away from a purely mechanistic approach. I will use a recent discussion of the causal concepts of pathways and cascades as alternatives to a mechanistic approach, to investigate what sort of explanatory concept we should consider the neuroscience concepts of attractors and manifolds. Through a discussion of what sort of explanations these concepts promote, I will argue that neuroscience is having (and needing) a shift away from mechanism-based explanations epistemically and ontologically. This has important implications for how neuroscientists investigate and understand pathology. Philosophers of science focusing on neuroscience need to stay up to date with these changes.