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Why Brains Can’t Think: Exposing the Mereological Fallacy
Rom Harré, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College
Monday 16th July, 7pm: Rewley House

As the 21st Century opened, the discipline of `academic psychology’ seemed to be separating into two radically distinct and perhaps irreconcilable domains. Cultural/Discursive psychology focused on the discursive means for the management of meaning in a world of norms, while Neuropsychology focused on the investigation of brain processes loosely correlated with intuitively identified cognitive processes. These two domains can be reconciled in a hybrid science that brings them together into a synthesis more powerful than anything psychologists have achieved before. The marriage of Neuroscience and Cultural/Discursive psychology is based on theinsights of many critics of the causal framework for psychology, but the most insightful has been one philosopher in particular, Ludwig Wittgenstein.. Hybrid psychology depends on the intuition that while brains can be assimilated into the world of persons, as among the instruments people use for carrying out many of their projects, people cannot be assimilated into the world of cell structures and molecular processes. To suppose that they can be has been called the `mereological fallacy’ – ascribing attributes of wholes to some of their parts. People think. Brains, parts of people’s bodies, do not.

This is one of two lectures offered as part of a new accredited short course History and Philosophy of Evidence-Based Health Care that are also open to the general public. The second lecture Translating Evidence in Medicine and Public Health by Professor Mike Kelly is taking place on Wednesay the 18th July at 7pm. Both lectures are free to attend, but booking is required.

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Professor Rom Harré

Role: Speaker

Rom Harré, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, has been one of the leaders of the movement to turn psychologists away from basing their researches...more on the assumption that human behaviour can be understood in terms of causes and their effects to a study of how people create, understand and manage meanings in accordance with rules, conventions and story-lines. He has promoted the idea of a discursive/cultural methodology in a number of publications, including The Explanation of Social Behaviour, with Paul Secord. Recently he has pioneered ‘positioning theory’, the systematic incorporation of studies of rights and duties to think and act in certain ways into research in various fields of psychology. Since retiring from the University Lectureship in Philosophy of Science at Oxford he has held a Professorship at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Recently the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Division 24 of the American Psychological Association) bestowed on Professor Rom Harré its highest honour, the Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Programmes including this module

This module can be studied as part of these programmes:

• Medical and health sciences