revision of an earlier deleted post

One of the panel discussions in the three-day Neuro Humanities Entanglement Conference at Georgia Tech ended with the observation that the cognitive sciences are still in a very early stage of their development. (I would add, “Even if their proponents engage in rhetoric that would lead us to think or believe otherwise.”)

These sciences have, however, advanced sufficiently that we can now (or so I think) begin to engage in some efforts of historical re-interpretation...such as recognizing the lineaments of proto-versions of the cognitive sciences that would not have recognized themselves as such. (Examples occur to me that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend spending time on...just because even the least useful system contains a kernel of authentic discovery doesn’t mean that it is worthwhile for anyone other than historians to analyze that kernel of authentic discovery.) It ought to be possible to begin to study the physiology of all these aspects of the inner life more systematically than it has hitherto been.

The problem, as an encounter at the very beginning of the Conference made clear, is that the physiological researchers often don’t know how to interpret the relevant historical documents and the folks who know how to ferret out the implications of historical texts and material objects often have only the most rudimentary and metaphoric knowledge of the physiology. Barbara Maria Stafford brought some of these types together in a setting that occasionally allowed participants to correct the naive errors of other specialists, and more often gave rise to efforts to fill in some of the gaps in personal knowledge that most of the participants were all too ready to admit.

If I ever get my own current interdisciplinary projects sufficiently resolved before their deadlines, I look forward to returning to Stafford’s anthology of essays on bridging the divide between the humanities and the neurosciences. I wish the gulf between the neurosciences and the sociology of knowledge had been bridged a bit more intensively, since it is in that juncture that it becomes possible to rethink our least comprehended mental limitations.

footnote to the foregoing

One problem with this journal, apart from the fact that statistics suggest it is mainly being read by an unknown number of LJ Friends and a host of ex-East Bloc spam bots, is that the core readership otherwise comes from completely different realms of life and scholarship. Most of the Friends found me via a shared interest in the fiction of John Crowley (about which and whom Lisa Yaszek said some very complimentary things in her 2008 book Galactic Suburbia...she would doubtless have done so at the Neuro Humanities Entanglement Conference also had she had more than ten minutes in which to summarize and analyze the entire history of science fiction). I have a few professional friends from the history of religions who remember to check in every once in a great while. A greater number of people from the art world drop by more often. And the posts are often addressed to none of these, but to scholars who would stumble across them in the process of doing web searches for keywords. (I avoid certain keywords for the same reason.)

I made the mistake, which I usually don’t allow myself, of citing specific unfashionable names in the original version of the previous post, now amended to remove them. More than one of my mentors taught me the futility of trying to re-examine individuals who have come under scholarly dismissal for whatever reason, since all it does is stir up the emotions involved in the original controversy. The dialogue is almost never advanced thereby.

It makes far more sense to reinterpret specific ideas and insights without ascribing them to any one individual, since the point is to rethink them for the present day, in any case. There is no reason to send people to books that need to be translated into a contemporary idiom (and corrected in minor or major details, sometimes utterly crucial ones) unless those books have been framed in a fresh context that allows the contemporary reader to understand why the books might still be worthy of their attention.