The Brain–Cognitive Behavior Problem: A Retrospective

Abstract: In 2001, I was invited to write a review for a prominent journal. I thought that the best way to exploit this opportunity was to write an essay about my problems with ill-defined scientific terms and question whether the dominant framework in neuroscience is on the right track. My main argument was that many terms in neuroscience are inherited from folk psychology and are often used in two ambiguous ways: both as the thing-to-be-explained (explanandum) and the thing-that-explains (explanans; e.g., “we have memory because we remember,” “we remember because we have memory”). These postulated terms are assumed to be entities with definable boundaries, and within this framework, the goal of neuroscience is to find homes and mechanisms for these terms in the brain with corresponding boundaries (I called this “the correlational approach”). I warned that a framework dictated by human-centric introspection might not be the right roadmap for neuroscience and argued that there should be another way of carving up the brain’s “natural kinds.”