What’s so critical about Critical Neuroscience? Rethinking experiment, enacting critique

Abstract

In the midst of on-going hype about the power and potency of the new brain sciences, scholars within “Critical Neuroscience” have called for a more nuanced and sceptical neuroscientific knowledge-practice. Drawing especially on the Frankfurt School, they urge neuroscientists towards a more critical approach—one that re-inscribes the objects and practices of neuroscientific knowledge within webs of social, cultural, historical and political-economic contingency. This paper is an attempt to open up the black-box of “critique” within Critical Neuroscience itself. Specifically, we argue that limiting enactments of critique to the invocation of context misses the force of what a highly-stylized and tightly-bound neuroscientific experiment can actually do. We show that, within the neuroscientific experiment itself, the world-excluding and context-denying “rules of the game” may also enact critique, in novel and surprising forms, while remaining formally independent of the workings of society, and culture, and history. To demonstrate this possibility, we analyze the Optimally Interacting Minds (OIM) paradigm, a neuroscientific experiment that used classical psychophysical methods to show that, in some situations, people worked better as a collective, and not as individuals—a claim that works precisely against reactionary tendencies that prioritize individual over collective agency, but that was generated and legitimized entirely within the formal, context-denying conventions of neuroscientific experimentation. At the heart of this paper is a claim that it was precisely the rigors and rules of the experimental game that allowed these scientists to enact some surprisingly critical, and even radical, gestures. We conclude by suggesting that, in the midst of large-scale neuroscientific initiatives, it may be “experiment”, and not “context”, that forms the meeting-ground between neuro-biological and socio-political research practices.

Critical neuroscience meets medical humanities

“…Contrary to what some recent critical responses suggest,21 22 critical neuroscience is not a version of social constructivism. It neither presupposes nor aims to proclaim the ontological and/or epistemological priority of the socio-cultural over the neurophysiological.…”

Generative Critique in Interdisciplinary Collaborations: From Critique in and of the Neurosciences to Socio-Technical Integration Research as a Practice of Critique in R(R)I

“…However, Critical Neuroscience has shown hesitation to realise the proclaimed 'hands-on approach'. Fitzgerald et al assert that Critical Neuroscience has resorted to armchair critique [88], instead of 'linking critique with lab practice to influence the shape of future research in neuroscience' ( [86], p. 74). Most of the members of the initiative have not engaged with neuroscientists in experimental research, possibly because their mission is to reposition experiments in their 'context' ( [89], p. 35).…”

“…Neuroscientists are left empty-handed, deprived of material that they could either rethink and improve or contribute to an interdisciplinary project. Such rather destructive armchair critique has pervaded early critical scholarship on the neurosciences, which is why reviewers from the neurosciences have argued that despite calls for interdisciplinarity, 'bidirectional feedback is hardly found' ( [90] In order to overcome this problem, Fitzgerald et al suggest that 'it may be "experiment", and not "[social] context", that forms the meeting-ground between neuro-biological and socio-political research practices' ( [88], p. 1). Such suggestions have also been raised in recently published scholarship that has continued the critical trajectory [91][92][93].…”

Den offentliga ohälsan : En historisk studie av barnpsykologi och -psykiatri i svensk media 1968-2008

“…Även samtida vetenskapssociologiska studier har, i likhet med Ward, varit kritiska mot mer klassiskt sociologiska och historiska utgångspunkter som allt för starkt använt sig av samhälleliga förklaringar och kontextualiseringar. Exempelvis distanserar sig Fitzgerald et al (2014) från argument som utgår från att neurovetenskaperna är politiskt naiva och i behov av kritiska kontextualiseringar av deras objekt och praktiker. De menar i stället att neurovetenskapliga experiment kan artikulera (nya och överraskande) former av socio-politisk kritik.…”