“Divide and Conquer” or “Murder to Dissect”?: Commentary by Jason Brown

My commentary on Semenza's paper labors under the burden of having to refute almost every line of its content. I only hesitate because prior critiques have passed unnoticed (Schweiger and Brown, 1989). Surely, the diagram school that Semenza so admires survives in cognitive neuropsychology not by virtue of the emptiness of past criticism but because an alternative agenda was not promoted with sufficient vigor, clarity, or popular appeal. The old models were based on the telegraph (Eggert, 1977), the new ones on circuit boards, and both have nothing to do with brains. Indeed, it is a striking conceit that a separate level of analysis of mental representation, consisting of little more than a compilation of local, often inconsistent, models that uncouple brain and cognition, can drive research at the neurological level.

Semenza assumes one can momentarily “clean the field of investigation” and ignore the “noise/friction” of affect, context, culture, and history, returning to these topics once the results of a scientific study are clear. The problem is that after the mental components have been identified, the “noise” that was ignored at the start cannot then be reinserted in the object, where it belongs, but is attached artificially by way of external relations. An example is the ad hoc postulation of a “binding mechanism” to unify a multiplicity of neurocognitive modules that should never have been isolated in the first place. Another example concerns the relegation of affect to a “furnace in the basement,” extrinsic to mental content. This is one area of overlap with psychoanalytic concepts. In the metapsychology, Freud attempted to reconcile a static connectionism with the flux of process in the idea that the substantive or self-identical traces inherited from association psychology were modulated by libidinal drive energy (cathexis) which, on the model of the synapse, was conceived as an extrinsic factor.

I have no idea whether Semenza understands the implications o