Neurophilosophy: Pros and cons

In his Explaining the brain (2007) Car Craver begins with a distinction between neurophilosophers and philosophers of neuroscience. Philosophers of the first kind use neuroscientific findings to address questions that belong traditionally to the field of philosophy of mind. Philosophers of the second kind are concerned with the goals and methods of neuroscientific research: for them neuroscience is an object of inquiry rather than a tool. In this communication, I want to suggest that it is not advisable to divorce completely neurophilosophy from philosophy of neuroscience, as the special task of the latter is to describe practices and to make explicit epistemic norms without which neurocognitive research cannot be characterized, assessed and made philosophically relevant. As cognitive neuroscience is a source of ongoing theoretical discussion rather than a compendium of empirical truths, extracting from it unambiguous support for philosophical claims is no easy task. Using recent work on episodic memory (Schacter & Addis, 2007), I shall try to show, however, that stressing the importance of “organized skepticism” does not necessarily prevent philosophy from drawing the moral of converging results.