amount awarded: $5,000
Concepts form the framework of philosophical and scientific discourse; they quite literally determine what we study and how we organize the results of our investigations. Concepts are not tied to the disciplinary context from which they emerged—they cross disciplinary boundaries. In this process, concepts can take on new meanings or find themselves used in dissimilar ways that deemphasize their initial complexity. In turn, this can introduce confusion, especially when experts across disciplinary boundaries communicate using seemingly shared concepts. This case is acute when we consider the interface between philosophy and neuroscience, where philosophically laden concepts, such as MECHANISM and REPRESENTATION find themselves at the heart of explanatory claims about how neural systems precipitate behavior (cf. Hochstein 2015, Hochstein 2016). Likewise, concepts originating from the cognitive sciences, and their experimental analogues in neuroscience, including WORKING MEMORY and ATTENTION, find themselves imported into contemporary philosophical debates about the structure and organization of the mind (Carruthers 2015; Prinz 2012; Mole 2011; Wu 2014).
We propose to begin the process of mapping the conceptual interface between philosophy and neuroscience by drawing on our team’s expertise with interdisciplinary methods. In doing so we can determine whether and to what extent core concepts from each discipline have changed as they’ve crossed the disciplinary divide. We have two aims that correspond to the major studies we plan to run: First, we will use topic modeling on custom corpora comprised of 104 – 105 philosophy and neuroscience documents to extract latent topics corresponding to each concept of interest. These topics will help us visualize the extent and shape that each concept takes up within each disciplines’ literature, and in turn will help us winnow down the set of views that we will test in subsequent studies. Second, we will use these results to design xphi vignette and conjoint analysis studies that canvass participant’s judgments about the intuitiveness and explanatory scope of prominent views of each of our four target concepts (e.g., by presenting participants with quotes from real and sham papers corresponding to different theories for each concept) while simultaneously tracking individual’s level of familiarity and expertise with each concept. Analyses of these concepts will allow us to narrow our final stimuli and measures as we develop a brief five-minute survey aimed at 400 expert attendees at the 2024 APA Central and CNS meetings. Results from these surveys will allow us to test our hypotheses about whether multivalent concepts (e.g., REPRESENTATION and WORKING MEMORY) from one discipline are treated univocally as they move across disciplinary boundaries. Our proposal combines novel methods to determine how concepts change and will help facilitate clearer communication between experts across this key disciplinary divide.
Javier Gomez-Lavin, PhD. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University
Tim-Elmo Feiten, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy and the Life Sciences, University of Cincinnati
Eric Hochstein, PhD. Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria
Mary Vitello, PhD Candidate, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
Raquel Krempel, PhD. Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Logic, State University of Campinas, Brazil