Developing Concepts for Neuroscience: A Philosophical Toolkit

Alongside models and methods, concepts are crucial tools to study and understand the brain. They help us pursue various goals, such as describing phenomena based on patterns in the data or explaining why these phenomena occur. Yet while terms such as "action potential" or "network" guide our efforts to reach these goals, other concepts have failed to advance our understanding of the brain. In this paper, we draw on recent work from philosophy of science to show that the success or failure of concepts in neuroscience depends on the epistemic goals the field aims to achieve. Looking at cases such as "default mode network," "cortical column," and "hierarchy," we formulate conditions under which introducing, refining, or replacing a concept succeeds or fails. These cases suggest that to better evaluate our concepts, we should make explicit which goals we aim to achieve when using them.