Begging the Pseudo-Question

I recently got involved in an “audiophile” online discussion thread replete with devious trolling, commenter bans, incivility—the works. I do this from time to time because raucous argumentation forces one to think in tactical and strategic ways that are not the norm in everyday life. I also learn new things. In this case, I went on several quests, hunting down papers on the ability of Chinese language speakers to disambiguate tones in Gaussian noise, how distortion artifacts impact our perception of spatialization in binaural audio presentations, and even Rayleigh wave detection by sand scorpions (I actually worked on a simulator for that as a late undergrad). One of the key disagreements in the thread was over the notion of “science.” There were several perspectives on this, with the first one being that science requires experimentation and therefore using scientifically-derived tools for investigating the performance of audio equipment does not amount to science. This is obviously a shrugger and a distraction. The other primary perspective is always that science is in constant revision and there may be new insights that prove this-or-that subtle hearing capability since human hearing is just sooooo amazing. We are sooooo amazing.

There’s a bit of a Two Cultures-like tension in this universe of audio equipment aficionados: while engineering and science brings them audio gear, they want it to be poetic and ineffable and the work of mastery based in genius rather than Fast Fourier Transforms. Graphs are boring. Listening is beautiful.

Part of the reason for the disagreement is clearly that we just don’t have shared meanings about concepts like science. We circle around them and try to triangulate using metaphors, analogies, and explore the logical consequences of limits and extensions to their meaning. Sometimes this gets deep like exploring the frontiers of Karl Popper’s notion of falsifiability as the line of demarcation between science and non-science. Sometimes it is quite a bit more emotional and a plea to possibility.

Scientists do similar things. They just do it in slightly different ways. P.M.S Hacker and Maxwell Bennett in Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language emphasize this through an analysis of the ways that neuroscientists discuss aspects of brain activities that they are uncovering through science. Hacker and Bennett think there are fairly uniform errors of language use. They don’t have much to say about the science itself, just about the language (Bennett is a scientist, but Hacker is an analytic philosopher who is the leading authority on Wittgenstein). Often these scientists use everyday language appropriated via metaphor to describe the way they think things happen in human brains:

We seem driven to say that such neurons [as respond in a highly specific manner to, e.g., line orientation] have knowledge. They have intelligence, for they are able to estimate the probability of outside events—events that are important to the animal in question. And the brain gains its knowledge by a process analogous to the inductive reasoning of the classical scientific method. Neurons present arguments to the brain based on the specific features that they detect, arguments on which the brain constructs its hypothesis of perception.

This quote illustrates a problem of language for Hacker and Bennett: the attribution of the notions of knowledge, arguments, and reasoning to neurons. It has nothing much to do with the science that Colin Blakemore has done on the observed behavior of neurons, it is the conceptual framework imbued with phrases that only apply to whole human beings that is problematical. People have knowledge. Libraries contain knowledge. Inductive reasoning is what people do. People present arguments. Brains do something else that is of a different character altogether.

Now, we seem very comfortable with these types of analogous and metaphorical applications of everyday terminology to the complexities of neuronal and brain activities. It’s how scientists communicate complex ideas. It’s how we all learn new concepts. For Hacker and Bennett, however, it can also lead us astray into complete nonsense and, critically:

…by speaking about the brain’s thinking and reasoning, about one hemisphere’s knowing something and not informing the other, about the brain’s making decisions without the person’s knowing, about rotating mental images in mental space, and so forth, neuroscientists are fostering a form of mystification and cultivating a neuro-mythology that are altogether deplorable. For, first, this does anything but engender the understanding on behalf of the lay public that is aimed at. Secondly, the lay public will look to neuroscience for answers to pseudo-questions that it should not ask and that neuroscience cannot answer. Once the public become disillusioned, they will ignore the important genuine questions neuroscience can both ask and answer. And this surely matters.

It does matter, but I’m not sure there is much to be done about it (their remarks on qualia should be considered differently, however, but that is a matter of philosophical concern, not neuroscientists trying to fight in the wrong weight class). The material should be explained, new concepts should be bridged over to the interested public, our shared knowledge should be expanded. Knowing something about how we think and emote, and how our neural systems lead to that, is valuable for interrogating our own biases and those of others.

This process of using tools like metaphor may be a fraught minefield (ahem, qualia again), but is essential to science itself and even our attempts to simulate or replicate human intelligence. Still, as I saw once again out in the trollish world of lively discussions of science, where pseudo-questions arise they can always be analyzed again and, seemingly, again and again, and then once more.