Let the blogging begin

Not that the world needs another neuro-psycho-philo-blog. But there is a surge of wonderful work in the philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of memory and imagination that may be of interest to some readers, who might be totally or partially unaware of such developments. So I’ve decided to overcome my fear of making grammatical and stylistic mistakes in the public arena of the bloggosphere in English, and I decided to start this blog. Mind you, though: I have an agenda. I believe research in the psychology and cognitive science of memory and imagination is lending strong credence to the view that these aren’t single faculties, that the cognitive processes that compose them are intertwined, multifarious and complex, and—more importantly—that the best way to understand the functional roles of specific brain regions requires moving away from the view that there is a clear correspondence between brain functions and psychological functions. In fact, I believe that trying to find neural correlates for X, where X is a folk psychological term is almost always the wrong way to go. The rules that govern the functional structure of the brain are not the same rules that dictate the meaning and uses of folk psychological terms. Sorry Professor Armstrong, but if you were to have all the platitudes of folk psychology pinned down, the job of understanding the mechanisms that fulfill the functional roles that correspond to such platitudes wouldn’t have even started. And maybe, only maybe, psychological readings of the massive modularity hypothesis will be jettisoned, and people would again pay more careful attention to Lashley. But I’m getting ahead of myself.