Each member of
the small group should briefly indicate what they found most
striking in the reading; the group as a whole should ultimately formulate a
question for full seminar. Since each
group will be made up of members from both seminars, the number of
questions will be larger than in the past.
Q1 How did Kandel and others expand his initial work on the “three simplest forms” of memory and learning in Aplysia to issues of implicit and explicit memory in mammals (ch. 20 passim). How did this work provide a biological basis for Hebbian ideas about strengthening association and philosophical positions taken by Aristotle and British empiricist philosophers? (p. 284)
Q2 In his discussion of the
history of research concerning sensory modalities, Kandel says the results are
“shades of Immanuel Kant” and quotes Mountcastle’s conclusion that “sensation
is an abstraction, not a replication of the real world.” (p. 304) A few pages
later he describes O’Keefe’s work on spatial knowledge as applying “Kantian
logic.” (p. 307) What do you think
Kandel means when he invokes the
philosopher Kant in this context? How
would you briefly summarize the material he presents in chapters 22 and 23 around
this allusion to Kant?
Q3 How does Kandel connect fear and mental illness? How does he relate memory (and his work on Aplysia) to fear? (p337ff) How does he extend his discussion to schizophrenia? (ch. 26 passim) Do you think that he has made a convincing case for a “reductionist” stategy in researching mental illness?
Q4 Throughout the book, and especially in chapter 27, Kandel points
to ways in which biology can be brought to bear on psychoanalytic ideas (p.
375, 388). What remains for the psychoanalytic
approach to psychiatry if we embrace a “radical reductionism” in brain
science? Are you convinced?
Q5 Kandel briefly compares
Edelman’s approach to consciousness with Crick and Koch’s approach (p. 383).
What are the two approaches? Which seems more attractive to you, given Kandel’s
discussion of consciousness and your current beliefs about the nature of
consciousness?
Q6 How does Kandel
characterize the “new science of mind” that he discusses at various points in
the last half of the text? (pp. 304, 336, 376, 423ff, subtitle of book). Has he
made a convincing case that this is a new science of the Mind rather
than a broader, more sophisticated science of the Brain? That is, does
he point to a way of addressing what
David Chalmers called “the hard problem of consciousness?” (p. 381).
Q7. Historians and
philosophers of science have embraced several general schemas to describe and
explain scientific change. How, if at all, does Kandel’s history of
neuroscience illustrate these views?
What about the larger domain of a “science of mind” that initially
included Freudian psychology and behaviorist and later cognitive
psychology?
(1)
Some
have described a slow, progressive growth of knowledge in a scientific domain.
Various forms of positivism took this approach, starting with August Comte in
19th century and the so-called logical positivists in the 20th
century. This view typically emphasized
that the growth was gradual accumulation of “facts,” established by crucial
experiments, which gradually justified or confirmed scientific theories.
(2)
Another
position, associated with Thomas Kuhn, presented a more “punctuated
equilibrium” account of scientific growth with periods of stasis (normal
science) alternating with periods of rapid change. This approach questioned the notion of gradual progressive or
positive accumulation of scientific knowledge in favor of seeing transformation
of scientific points a view as a “gestalt shift” only loosely connected to an
evidential basis at the time of transformation.
(3)
A
third position, associated with Karl Popper, emphasized the importance of
falsification (rather than confirmation) in science and promoted a vision of
scientific change featuring bold conjectures, vigorous efforts to falsify these
conjectures, and provisional theories that survived these efforts.