Big brains and Boskops: Phrenology lives!

Abstract

A persistent strategy in contemporary neuroscience would reduce complex social and cognitive phenomena to states and functions of the brain. When extended to reach fundamental issues in philosophy, a new specialty—neurophilosophy—is offered as a means by which to collapse a number of perennial questions into a more tractable set of structure–function relationships. Illustrative are studies of the “locus” of moral decision-making (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001) and challenge to volitionalism based on studies of events in the brain (Libet, 1985). The case of the “Boskops,” presumed possessors of unusually large brains, offers an object lesson in the dangers of arguing hypotheses against facts. Human achievements are the incontestable facts. Whether and how these relate to human anatomy and physiology are questions that are unlikely to be settled by anatomists.