Vagueness and Mechanistic Explanation in Neuroscience
Vagueness and Mechanistic Explanation in Neuroscience

Summary/Abstract: The problem of fuzzy boundaries when delineating cortical areas is widely known in human brain mapping and its adjacent subdisciplines (anatomy, physiology and functional neuroimaging). Yet, a conceptual framework for understanding indeterminacy in neuroscience is missing, and there has been no discussion in the philosophy of neuroscience whether indeterminacy poses an issue for good neuroscientifi c explanations. My paper addresses both these issues by applying philosophical theories of vagueness to three levels of neuroscientifi c research, namely to (i) cytoarchitectonic studies at the neuron level (ii) intra-areal neuronal interaction measured by the BOLD-signal of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and (iii) inter-areal connectivity between different cortical areas. The rest of the paper explores how this framework can be extended to mechanistic explanations in neuroscience. I discuss a semantic and an ontic interpretation of vagueness in mechanistic explanations and argue how both become scientifi cally interesting from the perspective of a philosophy of scientifi c practice.

• Details
• Contents