The silence of psychology

Martin Davies (Oxford University)

It is widely accepted that there is no way of putting a boundary around the kinds of evidence that might be relevant to the confirmation or disconfirmation of an empirical hypothesis or theory. Nevertheless, the relevance of neuroscientific evidence – particularly, neuroimaging evidence – to psychological theories cast purely in terms of cognitive structures and processes is contested. I shall discuss the following argument (generalising an argument in Coltheart, 2006):
(1) Theories in cognitive psychology speak about modularity, representations and algorithms, but they are silent on neuroscientific matters.
(2) Consequently, cognitive theories make no neuroscientific predictions.
(3) Therefore, neuroscientific findings neither support, nor count against, cognitive theories.

The ‘silence of psychology’ argument is an interesting theoretical argument for an extreme position on neuroimaging evidence and cognitive theories (Coltheart, 2004): ‘No facts about the activity of the brain could be used to confirm or refute some information-processing model of cognition.’ But the argument invites a parity of reasoning response: Cognitive psychological theories are silent, not only about the brain, but also about behaviour – both behaviour in healthy individuals and behaviour in patients following brain injury.

In the latter part of the talk, I shall consider whether, even if the ‘silence of psychology’ argument is not compelling and the extreme position is untenable, there are still reasons to expect that neuroimaging evidence will be of little help to cognitive psychology.

References
Coltheart, M. 2004: Brain imaging, connectionism, and cognitive neuropsychology. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 21–5.
Coltheart, M. 2006: Perhaps functional neuroimaging has not told us anything about the mind (so far). Cortex, 42, 422–7.