http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20070905.html

Dan, I just want you to know that I am not offended. After all, we all knew that liberals were wishy-washy weenies with no gumption or stick-to-it-ness. Present company excepted, of course.

From some perspectives in philosophy of mind, the ways in which the literature from neuroscience is being exploited is troubling. Anyone in the legal profession enchanted by such literature would be well-served by a dose a scepticism, and better served by acquaintance with more philosophically sophisticated appraisals of this literature, especially if it is thought to be relevant to the law and public policy questions in general. Among the titles one might read: M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), Sunny Auyang, Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), Vincent Descombes, The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), as well as many of the books Hilary Putnam has written since Reason, Truth and History (1981). I think it is very important that we understand that the mind is not reducible to the brain (or at least that there are strong reasons for not believing in mind/brain identity and/or being crystal clear as to the sorts of inferences [i.e., circumscribing more strongly than has been the practice to date] that might be drawn from inductively discovering strong “correlates” between neural activity and mental states). To be sure, not a few philosophies regnant today are more or less “scientistic,” but there are philosophical viewpoints on the mind and brain that question in the first instance some of the claims coming from neuroscientists about the relevance of their findings, let alone the claims of those outside neuroscience proper who are eager to apply these findings to their own intellectual fields of inquiry or socio-economic and political worlds. For instance, and briefly if not paradigmatically, to speak of “wanting” and “liking” in terms of the brain (or ‘brain systems’) makes no sense whatsoever, for the brain neither wants nor likes. (This elementary fact is thoroughly explored in the Bennett and Hacker volume; the former is an esteemed neuroscientist, the latter is a distinguished philosopher.)

Incidentally, the fact the literature in an area is burgeoining, becoming something of a cottage industry, is not a testament to its plausibility or worthiness. There’s an enormous amount of literature in the field of Evolutionary Psychology, and much of it is of dubious or little scientific merit: the claims are often extragavant, and the philosophical (philosophy of science) presuppositions and assumptions are often tenuous or eminently arguable in a way not routinely acknowledged or understood by many of its foremost or well-known practitioners.

So, again, before we get too excited about the findings from neuroscience, let’s take a deep breath and delve a bit more deeply into some of the philosophical issues that are sometimes hidden, forgotten or otherwise worthy of address….

With regard to the research above, and although I’m hardly a conservative (well, in some cultural sense I’m a bit conservative), I think conservatives (and liberals for that matter) can safely ignore this nonsense.