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what a pole is – that is, what the expression ‘pole’ means, and also what counts as finding a pole of the Earth. Otherwise, like Winnie-the-Pooh, one might embark on an expedition to the East Pole.) The moot question is: does it make sense to ascribe such attributes to the brain? Is there any such thing as a brain’ s thinking, believing, etc.? (Is there any such thing as the East Pole?)

      The misascription of psychological attributes to the brain is a degenerate form of Cartesianism

      Why, then, was this form of description, and the forms of explanation that are dependent upon it, adopted without argument or reflection? We suspect that the answer is: as a result of an unthinking adherence to a mutant form of Cartesianism. It was a characteristic feature of Cartesian dualism to ascribe psychological predicates to the mind, and only derivatively to the human being. Sherrington and his pupils Eccles and Penfield cleaved to a form of dualism in their reflections on the relationship between their neurological discoveries and human perceptual and cognitive capacities. Their successors rejected the dualism – quite rightly. But the predicates which dualists ascribed to the immaterial mind, the third generation of brain neuroscientists applied unreflectively to the brain instead. It was no more than an apparently innocuous corollary of rejecting the two-substance dualism of Cartesianism in neuroscience. These scientists proceeded to explain human perceptual and cognitive powers and their exercise by reference to the brain’ s exercise of its cognitive and perceptual abilities.

      The ascription of psychological attributes to the brain is senseless

      Neuroscientists’ ascription of psychological attributes to the brain may be termed ‘the mereological fallacy’ in neuroscience

      3.3 Qualms Concerning Ascription of a Mereological Fallacy to Neuroscience

      Methodological objections to the accusation that neuroscientists are guilty of a mereological fallacy

      If a person ascribes a predicate to an item to which the predicate in question logically could not apply, and this is pointed out to him, then it is only to be expected that he will indignantly insist that he didn’ t ‘mean it like that’. After all, he may say, since a nonsense is a form of words that says nothing, that fails to describe a possible state of affairs, he obviously did not mean a nonsense – one cannot mean a nonsense, since there is nothing, as it were, to mean. So his words must not be taken to have their ordinary meaning. The problematic expressions were perhaps used in a special sense, and are

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