The difference between the concept of “truth” in the sciences and the humanities is endlessly fascinating. I’ve bloviated about it before, in the context of research progress. But another instance came to me recently as I was reading a book called Affective Ecologies1.
We use neurons when we reflect, so, maybe?
The book is about how the reader’s psychological affect is the channel by which literature affects our attitudes about the events related in a story. Prof. WvM takes the idea of “mirror neurons” and runs with it, treating mirror neurons as the physiological mechanism underlying readers’ empathy. All well and good, except, well, the mirror-neuron hypothesis seems not to be true. When it was conceived a few decades ago, it was greeted with excitement, but as people have looked at it more closely, it seems to flunk a couple of tests. That’s a shame — had the hypothesis panned out, it might have led to therapies that could have helped almost everyone on the autism spectrum.
Prof. WvM introduces the idea of mirror neurons on page 23. On page 25, she acknowledges that there are problems.
“Needless to say, the use of mirror neuron research in literary studies does have its caveats. As Kuzmičová points out, “in each attempt at fusing literary theoretical speculation with experimental cognitive science, one could identify a host of methodological problems, starting from the fact that the stimuli used in cognitive experiments usually do not bear the slightest resemblance to literary narrative”. Like Kuzmičová, I have chosen to accept most of these problems as a natural part of any interdisciplinary inquiry.”
That last line is what got me intrigued. With my scientist’s hat on, if I find one of the premises of my research is wrong, I go get a new premise. But maybe this book has a different purpose. Could it be that there’s a value to carrying out the train of logic to a conclusion, even if the starting place isn’t true? I suppose it’s reasonable to presume that something must be the physiological basis for empathy. Almost nothing of the argument depends on specifics of biology, so once the correct mechanism is discovered, the argument here can be carried over directly.
This is an interesting role for the humanities: the repository of all ideas, whether they work or not. It certainly explains why it’s necessary to keep incorrect concepts around and make grad students learn them and cite them, as I was complaining about in the older post.
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