Neuroepistemology as a Field of Cognitive Philosophy and Knowledge Studies

The article presents the results of an analysis of the concept of neuroepistemology, the history of its formation, the methods of determining its object and characteristics of possible methodological solutions. To achieve this aim, two specific objectives have been mapped out: to consider the evolution of the conception of neuroepistemology in the context of the history of science and philosophy; and to systematize the existing ideas about neuroepistemology, its object, methods and characteristics. The main result of the research is that, despite the forty-year history of neuroepistemological projects, this term is each time constructed anew. Different interpretations are not compared to each other, and the authors rarely refer to the history of the concept, continuing to fill it with new contradictory meanings. This conclusion follows from the examination of thematic publications on neuroepistemology in English, Russian, and mainly in German, due to the high number of references to neuroepistemology in German-language cognitive philosophy (E. Ozer, F. Seitelberger, K. Vogeley, M. Peschl). If we attribute the earliest attempts to synthesize philosophical and biological approaches to knowledge (F. Nietzsche, K. Lorenz, U. Maturana, F. Varela) to presuppositions of neuroepistemology and start with the mentions of the word “neuroepistemology”, we find three relevant interpretations of the concept. The first (probably presented by John Hughlings Jackson) treats neuroepistemology as a research of epistemic communities of producers of neuroscientific knowledge. The object of such research is epistemic culture (K.K. Cetina), and the research aims can be achieved by the methods of the philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge, and epistemology. The second interpretation of neuroepistemology (P.S. Churchland) concerns the use of neuroscientific methodologies to address issues of knowledge. These studies are an attempt to answer the question of how a person knows, using all the possible tools of the brain studies (the research of concept cells is a relevant example). The third interpretation (E. Ozer) begins with the consistent naturalization of the theory of knowledge in the 1980s and insists on finding its own methods or, in extreme cases, on its own ways of integrating particular methods of neuroscience and epistemology. The article describes the principles and rules of such neuroepistemological reasoning, its features and methodological perspectives.

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