Consciousness as a Scientific Concept: A Philosophy of Science Perspective

The downfall of structuralist schools of psychology in the early-twenieth century is a well-known piece of cognitive science folklore. The ‘introspec-tionists’, as their detractors called them, intended to use scientific methods to map the world of sensory experience, but their research programme collapsed somewhat abruptly when it was discovered that the results of the various structuralist labs were incommensurable. If the stronger conclusions of Elizabeth Irvine’s first book, Consciousness as Scientific Concept, are correct, we might one day regard contemporary scientific research into consciousness as we presently regard introspectionism: a troubled chapter in the history of cognitive science. Irvine’s thesis is that the concept of consciousness should be eliminated from scientific practice. This is not only because a science of consciousness cannot bear fruit, but because retention of the concept is an impediment to progress in the cognitive sciences. Irvine uses various lines of attack, arguing that we have no adequate or uncontroversial measure of consciousness (Chapters 2, 3, and 4); that a science of consciousness will not experience the kind of convergence between its measures and methods successful sciences usually do (Chapter 5); that consciousness does not qualify as a scientific kind (Chapter 6); and that a widely used paradigm for research into consciousness, the content-matching method, cannot work (Chapters 7 and 8). The book culminates by bringing together conclusions reached earlier in the book to argue the concept of consciousness meets the conditions under which a con-cept is usually eliminated from scientific practice (Chapter 9)