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- Page navigation anchor for Forging Connections: Uniting Neuroscience and Philosophy of ScienceForging Connections: Uniting Neuroscience and Philosophy of Science
Levenstein et al. aptly highlight some of the foundational issues in theoretical neuroscience, such as the role of abstraction and idealization in providing scientific explanations and understanding, and distinguishing under which conditions neuroscientific models provide genuine explanations, or mere descriptions, predictions, or control.
The authors rightly emphasize that philosophers of science can also gain valuable insights from the vast body of neuroscience literature, by employing methods of digital humanities, such as text mining, in line with the cognitive metascience approach (Miłkowski, 2023).
Conversely, neuroscientists can benefit from the latest research in philosophy of science, particularly on the epistemic norms of diverse kinds of explanations in neuroscience, e.g., topological (Kostić, 2020), computational (Miłkowski, 2013; Chirimuuta, 2018), dynamical (Favela, 2020), and functional (Egan, 2017). Understanding the diverse goals of theories is conducive to fruitful exploratory and explanatory scientific practice. Some forms of scientific understanding are not always grounded in explanations, but also in diverse theoretical representations, e.g., diagrams, taxonomies, and diagnostic manuals (Miłkowski, 2023). Philosophical theories of understanding can also integrate different kinds of explanations in a single framework (Khalifa et al., 2022).
The need for these interdisciplinary connections is particularly vivid in the case of net...
Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.