Nicolas Langlitz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His work lies at the intersection of anthropology and the history of science, where he has been especially engaged with the epistemic cultures of the neurobiological and psychopharmcological sciences. His most recent monograph, ‘Neuropsychedilia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of The Brain’ is available from the University of California Press. At the beginning of March, Des Fitzgerald, HHS Web Editor, caught up with Nicolas about his recent article in History of the Human Sciences, ‘On a not so chance encounter of neurophilosophy and science studies in a sleep laboratory.’
Des Fitzgerald: We’ve had a lot of reflection lately on how disciplines like anthropology and sociology intersect the natural sciences (and especially life sciences); one of the things I found especially valuable about your article was its attention to a very different set of interdisciplinary relations – those between social scientists and philosophers. Why do you think there has been relatively little attention to these interactions? And where do you see their future?
Nicolas Langlitz: That’s true. Social studies of science, including anthropology and sociology, have not paid much attention to philosophy. I think there are political reasons for why the humanities and the social sciences attracted less interest. In his article “What Happened in the Sixties?“, Jon Agar located the birth of science studies in the long 1960s and the countercultural upheaval against technocratic government. Philosophically, one of the goals of science studies was to show that there was no clear demarcation of science from society, that scientists were human beings like you and me, and that their claims to objectivity were unfounded. Expert knowledge was put in its place and subordinated to a democratic process. When science studies were established as a field in the 1980s, we were certainly not ruled by philosopher kings and nobody felt the need to show how Derrida and Rorty had fabricated their truth claims – not least because these philosophers didn’t make any. But technoscientists did assert their expertise and transformed our world in powerful ways. So we started the Science Wars.
“On a Not So Chance Encounter” has a non-identical twin titled “Vatted Dreams,” in which I point to a second reason for the neglect of philosophers. They are really hard to study. Life scientists meet in a laboratory where they conduct experiments or they go to the field where they observe things. If they trust you, you can hang out with them and watch what they are doing. By contrast, philosophers sit at their desks in the library, their office, or – in the worst case – at home. You can’t install an observation post in their study. And, even if you did, watching them think and write wouldn’t provide much insight anyway. This is primarily a problem for the ethnography, not the history of the human sciences, I think. I was lucky in that my interest in the exchange between neurophilosophers and neuroscientists took me to a sleep lab in Finland. So I departed from a classical and more manageable laboratory ethnography setting not so different from the work I had done on neuropsychopharmacologists studying psychedelic drugs. Nevertheless the neurophilosophy project never flourished ethnographically. It mostly facilitated conceptual reorientations on my part that I document in the two articles mentioned and a third one that will soon be coming out in Common Knowledge.
DF: One of the things you seem to be negotiating in the article is your stance as an ethnographer, on the one hand, and your role as a collaborator in an interdisciplinary team, on the other: as you say in the article, your interest is not only in differences, but in common ground. What has it been like to inhabit the sleep laboratory both as ethnographer and collaborator? And where do you locate yourself in the sometimes vexed debates about anthropological inhabitations of the life sciences?
NL: As an ethnographer I felt relatively comfortable in this project because the group of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists I worked with had only been brought together by the Volkswagen Foundation’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and Humanities. So I was a member from the start and not the awkward newcomer trying to find his place at the margins of a community, which is the usual role of the ethnographer. I got along very well with the other members of the group, especially Jennifer Windt and Valdas Noreika.
However, I really failed as a collaborator. Originally, I saw my job as conducting what Niklas Luhmann and Paul Rabinow called second-order observations: observations of how other observers were observing the world. Ideally, this perspective allows you to identify the other observers’ blind spots, the contingency of their observations. But it’s no basis for collaboration. The philosophers were trying to develop a theory of dreaming based on the empirical findings of the sleep researchers – so philosophers and neuroscientists were looking at the same thing, dreams, while I was looking at something else, namely them. At one point, we had a series of, on my part, rather agonizing Skype conferences about an article we wanted to write together on dreaming as a model of consciousness. I had written a piece on using another altered state of consciousness, namely the inebriation with hallucinogenic drugs, as a model of psychosis. So I actually had things to say about this kind of modeling and yet I did not know how to contribute. Eventually Jenny and Valdas went ahead without me and I really couldn’t blame them (see Windt & Noreika 2011).
It eventually dawned on me that collaboration required that I would open up to first-order observations, that we had to look at the same thing. I had already been making this move in the context of psychedelic research. But there it was much easier. The effects of psychedelics depend on set and setting – they are shaped by the social and cultural milieu. It’s not difficult to insert yourself into this research as an ethnographer. In a publication in this very journal, I had argued for a rapprochement of psychopharmacology and the human sciences. But dreaming is a very different state of mind. The neural thresholds for sensory input and motor output are significantly elevated. Dreamers are cut off from their environments. The setting of the sleep laboratory doesn’t affect dream content a whole lot. It took me years to realize what a beautiful provocation this was. In anthropology and science studies, we implicitly or explicitly subscribe to externalist philosophies of mind, emphasizing how human experience is a product of the subject’s relations with the outer world, and we always criticize brain researchers and neurophilosophers for reducing mind to brain. It turns out that the neuroscience of dreaming provides some of the strongest support for internalist philosophies of mind. This led me to rethink the biases I had inherited from my own field of scholarship. That’s what I lay out in “Vatted Dreams.”
For me, doing ethnographic fieldwork is about learning to think differently. So I have no interest in mobilizing anthropological critiques against my interlocutors. There are enough people who regularly, although not very successfully, remind neuroscientists that they have left out the social and the cultural. I focus on mining other fields for things that we anthropologists ignore or habitually dismiss. My plea for positivism at the end of “On a Not So Chance Encounter” is another example of that.
DF: One of the many fascinating historical stories threaded through your article is the failure – if I can put it like this – of science studies to be the mode in which the conceptual would get sutured to the empirical within a naturalized epistemology (a role, indeed, for which it was a serious candidate). There’s an interesting counterfactual history at stake here: what happened? And how do you think things might have played out differently for what today calls itself STS?
I actually do think that the social studies of science are based on a naturalist epistemology. My plea to make neurophilosophy more materialist urges philosophers like the Churchlands to expand their naturalist approach from the mind to the sciences, which they continue to regard in a rather idealistic fashion. They slept through the social, practical, and material turns in the history of science. Of course, that also protected them against the constructionist excesses that came with these turns.
If you want me to make up a counterfactual history of the two fields, I would imagine a much earlier encounter of science studies and neurophilosophy in a neuroscience lab. Maybe between Latour and Churchland at the Salk Institute where they both conducted research in the late 1970s and 1980s, respectively. It might have made both fields more attentive to the fact that some natural phenomena are more affected by humans than others, and that this should be more of an empirical than metaphysical question.
DF: Your paper is one sense a genealogy of neurophilosophy – and (if I read you correctly) one of your claims is that neurophilosophy has been (or at least has become) a more orthodox intellectual space than some have seen it, or than it might otherwise have been. Is this the case? And what would your dream for a more heterodox neurophilosophy look like?
NL: Since my intellectual life doesn’t depend as much on how dynamic or sclerotic neurophilosophy is these days, I’m personally a lot more concerned about the orthodoxy of my own field. That’s what I’m primarily writing against.
But I do think that neurophilosophy could profit from catching up with a history of science that, in the past 30 years, has shifted its attention from scientific ideas to material practices. The Churchlands’ prediction that psychological understandings of the human mind will either become reducible to neuroscientific conceptions or be eliminated went far beyond the philosophy of mind. It drew from positivist and postpositivist philosophies of science, which also gave rise to science studies, historical epistemology, etc. What philosophy of mind would we arrive at if it took into consideration these later developments in how we think about science?
Regarding the orthodoxies of science studies, we should revert the theory-ladenness of observation and the constructedness of all phenomena from articles of faith to objects of empirical inquiry. We might also be able to learn something from the seemingly old fashioned histories of scientific ideas that the Churchlands continue to favor. That would be in line with John Tresch’s recent plea for reintegrating a materialist history of science with intellectual history.
DF: You end by saying that science studies scholars, among others, should perhaps not peremptorily dismiss a positivist attitude to objects like the dreaming brain? Can you expand on this – are you calling for a more nuanced ethnographic attention to positivism, or actually for something like a more positivistic STS? What is the content of your ‘materialist dream,’ as you put it?
NL: The ontological turn in anthropology and science studies has relegitimated metaphysical speculation. In principle, that seems fine to me. We need metaphysical frameworks for empirical research and materialism is one such framework. But these frameworks can and should be continuous with what we know about the world. In the case of dreaming, this knowledge is quite limited. Like the neurophilosophers, I’m confident that we will ultimately arrive at a materialist account. That’s my materialist dream, but at present it’s speculative. Positivism rejects all metaphysical speculation, which also sets it up in opposition to metaphysical materialism. It was not my intention to commit myself to materialism or positivism in general. It’s a situational epistemology in the face of a particular phenomenon. And in the current situation we don’t have enough experimental knowledge to simply dismiss Norman Malcolm’s dream positivism. So it’s not a plea for a more positivistic STS. If there is anything programmatic about it, then it would be to pay more attention to the peculiarities of phenomena instead of plastering everything with one and the same theory.
DF: One of the things that has captured my own attention about neuroscience is how, when you get close up, it is sometimes strikingly unnaturalistic, at least in the stereotyped sense of that term. This is one sense banal (all intellectual practices are weird, close up) – but it does seem to call for more nuance in how anthropologists and sociologists have understood the neurosciences. And indeed one of the lessons I take from your article is that both the neurophilosophers and the anthropologists have potentially failed to grasp the subtleties that structure the material culture of neuroscience. What are your thoughts on this?
NL: There is so much to be said about this, but it all depends on what you mean by naturalism. A prominent definition in anthropology, for example, is Philippe Descola’s. For him, naturalists assume continuity between humans and other animals on the physical level while postulating radical discontinuity on the mental or spiritual level. Descartes is the prototype of this kind of naturalism. Of course, that’s not what most neuroscientists and neurophilosophers mean by the term. They are Descartes bashers like everybody else these days. And yet some of their practices – most prominently animal experiments – are informed by this dualist conception of naturalism: it wouldn’t make epistemological sense to develop an animal model of a neuropsychiatric disorder, if you didn’t believe in physical continuity, but ethically it’s only permissible to experiment on these animals because their minds are regarded to be qualitatively very different from our own. I examined this closely in my book Neuropsychedelia. I also noticed that the psychopharmacologists I worked with only talked about themselves in neurochemical terms when they were joking. As soon as things got serious they reverted to vocabularies informed by the psy disciplines. Ian Hacking might well be right and Cartesianism continues to run strong. Maybe that even tells us something about universal forms of human cognition, as Descola suggests, but I don’t think he provides enough evidence for that.
There are probably other reasons for why the Churchlands are materialists in their philosophy of mind and idealists in their philosophy of science. In Science in Action, Latour argued that, in scientific discourse, statements qualify other statements either in a positive or negative modality. In the positive modality, a statement leads away from the first statement’s production to its consequences. By contrast, negative modality statements direct the reader’s attention to the conditions under which the first statement was produced. It’s not taken as a fact on which we can build but is opened up to further scrutiny. By and large, historical and ethnographic laboratory studies have adopted this critical perspective revealing the social and material practices generating scientific truth claims. Neurophilosophers prefer to draw philosophical conclusions from neuroscientific facts – they operate in the positive modality. That might explain why they are not so keen on the kind of epistemological naturalism that characterizes science studies. We can dismiss this as being uncritical, but we should also note that our own obsession with the negative modality is a very serious obstacle to any meaningful collaboration with neuroscientists and empirically oriented philosophers of mind. Although science studies originated in the long 1960s, we might have a brighter future if we stopped conceiving of ourselves as an epistemic counterculture.
‘On a not so chance encounter of neurophilosophy and science studies in a sleep laboratory,’ by Nicolas Langlitz, is available in the October 2015 issue of History of the Human Sciences: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/28/4/3.abstract