Knowing and the known

brain science and an empirically responsible epistemology

David D. Franks

pp. 125-139

in: Tibor Solymosi, John Shook (eds), Neuroscience, neurophilosophy and pragmatism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

This chapter will relate three subject matters: neurosociology, mirror neurons, and the pragmatic, social behaviorism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. Social behaviorism was basically initiated right after the turn of the last century in what has been called the Golden Age of the University of Chicago. As will be discussed below, it was an epistemology that avoided the dualism of the Enlightenment idealism and the British empiricists. Important for this chapter is the often neglected interest that Dewey and Mead had in the neuroscience of their times, as undeveloped as it was. Before coming to Chicago, Mead had worked in a neuroscience lab. The relevance of this for what follows is that whatever epistemology one chooses as most fruitful should include compatibility with the knowledge of the brain and mind that we have today. After all, it is the brain by which we know. Furthermore, as argued below, this brain is designed for sociality. It is social to the core. It is the social emotions as well as mirror neurons that drive and organize the brain. Any epistemology we choose must therefore be a social one. This fits in with Mead's social behaviorism and the epistemology that unfolds from it. This is the heart of a new sociologically oriented neuroscience referred to as neurosociology. Below I lay out why the brain is a social organism and why social behaviorism as an epistemology fits so well with it.

Cited authors

Dewey John

Mead George Herbert