Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience

by Carl F. Craver

What distinguishes good explanations in neuroscience from bad? Carl F. Craver constructs and defends standards for evaluating neuroscientific explanations that are grounded in a systematic view of what neuroscientific explanations descriptions of multilevel mechanisms. In developing this approach, he draws on a wide range of examples in the history of neuroscience (e.g. Hodgkin and Huxleys model of the action potential and LTP as a putative explanation for different kinds of memory), as well as recent philosophical work on the nature of scientific explanation. Readers in neuroscience, psychology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science will find much to provoke and stimulate them in this book.

Genres: Neuroscience, Philosophy, Science, Psychology

330 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2007

Reviews

[Anibal]

It´s a book about scientific explanation in neuroscience focusing in the normative aspects that allow us to distinguish good explanations form bad explanations. It defends a causal-mechanistic explanation and a corollary thesis: the mosaic unity of neuroscience.

[Klara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explaining the Brain provides a rigorous philosophical account of how neuroscience explains brain function through mechanistic models and multi-level analysis. Cravers concept of "mosaic unity" is particularly strong, showing how different levels of explanation work together without reducing neuroscience to a single framework. While the book is intellectually valuable and influential, its dense and technical style limits accessibility. Overall, it is a challenging but rewarding read, earning a solid four star rating.

[Philip Chaston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense text integrated into the debates on method, research programmes and how neuroscience can contribute to these. Craver takes you through the pitfalls for specific theories of science and how they do not marry up with the way that neuroscience operates and explains the brain as a multidisciplinary exercise. Historical examples abound and the final conjecture, the mosaic unity of science with its multiple approaches to mechanism, is a valuable tool to understand neuroscience

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Single-handedly the worst book I’ve ever had the displeasure of having to read.

[Abben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing in its treatment of "fundamentalist" accounts of causation. Some non-problems are manufactured and then used as indictments of various theories of explanation. For instance, the "failure" of certain theories to account for negative causation is a problem Craver seeks to solve. Negative causation is when, say, (my example) a dam holds back water, thus "causing" the village not to flood. Thus if you ask "what caused that village to be there" part of the answer is the dam.

This is troubling, because everything that could but doesn't intervene to prevent something is then included in the explanation of why it happened. So it's not just, say, the construction workers who built the house that explain why it is there, an adequate explanation for how the house came into being is also explained by the aliens from Sector X who generously decided not to blow it up. To me this opens Pandora's box. Craver acknowledges the problem but implores us to be practical when judging explanatory relevance, but never offers any theoretical way to demarcate legitimate from frivolous sources of causation. This is an unsatisfying and untheoretical answer to a problem of theoretical making.

Craver also criticizes Wesley Salmon's notion of "physical necessity" as inadequate to deal with Hume's problem of induction with respect to causes, but replaces it with notions of casual interaction that he leaves completely unexplained (compared to the explaining he wants Salmon to do).

I think the discussion of levels is very good, and while I found the neutrality to Jaegwon Kim's doctrine of casual closure to be troubling, Craver does not reject it, and I think it can be read as largely complementary to Kim's views on mental causation.