Speaker: Professor Martin Davies, FASSA, FAHA, Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy, University of Oxford
Date: 20 July 2016 (Wednesday)
Time: 16:00-17:00
Venue: Lecture Theater 1, Meng Wah Complex, HKU

Abstract

Some strong claims have been made for the irrelevance of neuroimaging evidence for choosing between purely cognitive theories. I am interested in theoretically interesting arguments that have been put forward in support of these claims – arguments that turn on the fact that purely cognitive theories are silent about the brain as such. I argue that one way to reject these arguments is to observe that an exactly parallel argument could be put forward for the claim that double dissociation evidence in cognitive neuropsychology is equally irrelevant to cognitive theories. Nobody would want to accept this latter argument; so we should not accept the argument about neuroimaging evidence either. But there is still an additional interesting issue. There seem to have been cases in which dissociation evidence resulted in the overturn of a cognitive theory that had previously been widely accepted. But it is not so easy to find clear cases in which a widely accepted cognitive theory has been overturned by neuroimaging evidence. Why is this?