Conceptual review as task analysis method Meta-analysis is a crucial research tool in cognitive neuroscience. For meta-analysis to succeed, it is important that studies that are grouped together investigate the same cognitive process and that studies that investigate different cognitive processes are grouped apart. After all, comparing apples and oranges makes no sense. Studies’ comparability depends on the cognitive tasks employed. Yet current meta-analyses, especially when automated (e.g. Neurosynth, BrainMap), select and group studies based on cognitive labels (e.g. ‘working memory’, (...) ‘self-reflection’). Unfortunately, labels are often applied inconsistently to tasks: different tasks may receive the same cognitive label, leading to a comparison of apples and oranges during meta-analysis; and the same task may receive different labels, leading to meta-analyses that fail to include all apples, so to speak. I propose conceptual review as a method for overcoming this problem. A conceptual review analyzes the conceptual implications of task choices made in a cognitive neuroscience subfield. It applies philosophical ways of uncovering and analyzing implicit assumptions to the methodological choices neuroscientists make. I explicate how this works and discuss several ways in which conceptual review would benefit cognitive neuroscience. Conceptual review could be combined with neuro-informatics to improve the quality of automated versions of meta-analysis and thereby provide an important contribution to progress in cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 153-166.

Love and personal identity. Everyday loves, ambiguous selves What we love matters for who we are. The idea may be self-evident, but how should it be understood exactly? One way is to conceptualize the formative influence of love on our identities in terms of ‘identification’: loving shapes who we are as we (volitionally) identify with the interests of the beloved and accept them as our own. Harry Frankfurt has fleshed out an influential identification-view along these lines. However, the identification-account is (...) insufficiently able to accommodate the ambiguous nature of everyday loving and the way in which these ambiguities affect our identity. A second way in which the formative influence of love on our identity can be conceptualized is as ‘relation’: we are indeed shaped by what we love but the (affective-volitional) character of the relation in which we stand to our loved ones determines our identity. The latter view is capable to account for ambiguous loves and corresponding ambiguities in the self. Also, it gives prominence to the practical problem of loving, that is, to the question of how to relate to the people we love. It offers a more realistic perspective on that problem, as it takes the enduring differences between us and our beloveds into account, as well as the intersubjective character of loving. In sum: how we love what we love shapes who we are. (shrink)