Neuroscience is rapidly becoming the hottest idea in town. Understanding how the brain works could allow us to predict, control and change human behaviour. Already there are assertions that brain scans can predict the way we vote, that drugs can make us fall in love, that scans can detect racial prejudice, and so on. These claims are radical enough in scientific journals – but on the front page of tabloids, they shatter deeply held convictions about free will and self-control.

Two Italian philosophers from Roma Tre University are sceptical. They have dissected some of the best-known arguments and experiments in the latest issue of Neuroethics and found them wanting. Contemporary neuroscience, they argue, is “intellectually stimulating and methodologically confused”. They warn that “hasty and over-ambitious conclusions may produce negative social and political consequences”.

“The crucial factor is, unsurprisingly, the vast appeal that the neurosciences exercise in our culture. Nowadays the common perception is that neurosciences are “more scientific”, “truer”, than all other forms of investigations—and thus should have the final word—because they can see into, and explain entirely, the “human engine”, i.e. the brain (considered as the source of all human behavior, feelings, thoughts, attitudes, goals and desires). Once again, this appeal is understandable, given the astonishing epistemic progress that those sciences have produced in recent years. Still, as we have argued, the widespread expectation that the neurosciences are on the verge of completely explaining human agency—and, for this reason, have an absolute primacy on the other forms of investigation—is, at the present state, unjustified.”

The whole article is well worth reading as corrective to what they call the “intellectual hubris” of some neuroscientists. It is sure to cause some controversy in the field. ~ Neuroscience, April