Research Seminar January 16th: John Bickle (Mississippi State University) - Little-e Eliminativism in Recent Molecular and Cellular Cognition

This talk develops a new kind of eliminativism about cognitive-level explanations which is implicit in some landmark experimental work in “molecular and cellular cognition.” Rather than an ontological thesis, “little-e eliminativism” is a metascientific thesis about actual practices of current molecular neuroscience. Such research sometimes discovers mechanisms for cognitive functions that conflict with accepted cognitive-level accounts. I provide a detailed example of such research, on the Ebbinghaus learning phenomenon (longer-interval distributed training generates stronger memories than does either briefer-interval distributed or massed training). From these experimental details I specify conditions that little-e eliminativist cases meet; contrast the account with the “Big-E Eliminativism,” more familiar to philosophers, owing to the influential work of Paul and Patricia Churchland thirty years ago; and argue for the increasing prominence of little-e eliminativism as molecular neurobiology encroaches further into cognitive science’s territory by sketching a second example from recent vision science.

Commentator: Leon Deouell, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem