Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I critique those brands of contemporary neuroscientific research into human health that rest on a set of interrelated, reductionist assumptions. These assumptions result in the claim that grieving or loving are caused mechanically by physiological, chemical, and electrical processes in the brain. I employ a critical realist understanding of scientific practice to detail methodological impossibilities entailed in reductionist neuroscience that are nevertheless used to justify claims to scientific knowledge and authority. I use an exemplar of such research to delineate specific errors and to show how knowledge claims based on them are therefore ideological, not scientific.