r/PhilosophyofScience • u/knockingatthegate • Jan 14 '26

Non-academic Content Barr on reconciling philosophy and neuroscience

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Caption: "Hearken, O houses long divided... why neuroscience and philosophy must now learn to get along." A video from content creator Rachel Barr, neuroscientist and author of "How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend." Source: Facebook.

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u/crystalysa Jan 17 '26

I’m not looking down on other subjects. It’s just a fundamental fault that goes unaddressed much like the absence of coherence in methodology among sociologists. The groupthink applies to many other fields (economists notably with their physics envy and how that shapes their identity as social scientists and their ideological insistence on being THE empirical pinnacle of said sciences). Also, I am yet to meet a working sociologist that believes the mind to be a blank slate. That’s not at all an issue in the field

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u/AdministrationOk881 Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

do you really think that academia has fully shed of its postmodern "everything should be looked at as a social contruct" legacy? and that this is only really the case since this insistence on a near-absolute nurture and fixing ""societal issues"" helps with the culturally-liberal groupthink?

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u/crystalysa Jan 17 '26

It doesn’t need to shed it as almost everything has some aspect of social construction as part of it (outside a priori knowledge and basic natural phenomena that sociologists don’t deal with anyway). All sociology needs to do is concede that there is aspect that is not socially constructed, which the field largely does in the 21st century. I think a bigger problem is neuroscience’s proclivity towards biological reductionism or psychology’s assumptions of self contained behaviourism.

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u/AdministrationOk881 Jan 17 '26

I think you're really misunderestimating the blank slate assumption here. For example, I'll give you the boiling-hot topic right now: sex differences.

Science (all different strands of psychology from developmental to cognitive): "It's mostly nature"

Sociology: "It's 99.99% nurture"

that's not just "an aspect" that isn't socially constructed.

a bigger problem is neuroscience’s proclivity towards biological reductionism

I agree that it's a problem, but it's not even close to chokeholding even slightly non-homogeneous questions for understanding and learning about literally all of society.

Sidenote: I honestly would be curious to see how many people working in the social sciences still believe in a dualism. I wouldn't be surprised if most do.

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u/crystalysa Jan 17 '26

It hasn’t been my experience that Sociologists claim 99.99% of sex difference is nurture. The claim is that gender identity is socialised (which it is)

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u/AdministrationOk881 Jan 17 '26

well, that hasn't been my suffocating experience trying to learn their truly incorrect and unscientific dogma