674374

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TAP0010.1177/0959354316674374Theory & PsychologyHarré

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Theory & Psychology

Hybrid psychology as a
2016, Vol. 26(5) 632­–646
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354316674374
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Rom Harré
Georgetown University

Abstract
Resolving some major philosophical errors in relating behaviour to brain structures and processes
can provide a firm foundation for a hybrid science that gives equal weight to both meaning
making (Cultural Psychology) and brain activity (Neuroscience). Neuroscientists, however, still
fall for two mereological fallacies: the first involving their use of predicates and the second in
the projection onto a whole of products of interactions with whole people and it is a fallacy to
project them back into that person as constituents. While brains are parts of human bodies it is
not clear that they are parts of persons. Clarification is then sought through the identification of
four “grammars” linked by three specific principles. Finally, arguments are developed to show that
objections to the idea that brains and their constituent organs are tools are misplaced.

Keywords
grammars, hybrid psychology, mereological fallacies, psychological discourse, task–tool
metaphor

Examination of the uses of words in the manner of Wittgenstein has shown that psycho-
logical concepts, which form the basis of the way we describe and explain how people
think, feel, act, and perceive, are distinct from and irreducible to the concepts of neu-
ropsychology. This insight has been the basis of some searching criticisms of the entre-
preneurial style of some recent neuropsychology. The vocabulary in question includes
words like “think,” “decide,” “remember,” “hope,” “anger,” and many more from the
huge range of human vernaculars. We note in passing that some vernaculars are not
mutually translatable for some psychologically significant vocabularies (Lutz, 1977).
This insight has a direct bearing on how studies of the neural changes that occur during

Corresponding author:
Rom Harré, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Email: harre@georgetown.edu

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Harré 633

the maturing of the human organism as a competent member of a society should be con-
ducted and interpreted.
At the core of the distinction between neuropsychology and cultural-discursive psy-
chology lies the contrast between the concept of an “organism,” for example, a member
of the animal species Homo sapiens, and the concept of a “person.” Is the science of
psychology directed only to the study of a certain species of higher animal or should it
be directed towards the study of persons? If the latter, then how is the fact that members
of the species Homo sapiens are the material and, seemingly, the only sites for persons to
be accommodated? Is there some principled way that we can move forward from reduc-
tionist strategies to the construction of a hybrid psychology that incorporates both ways
of studying human beings in a coherent synthesis? Only if we can see how a synthesis of
cultural-neurological approaches to studying humanity is possible can we set about
extending the idea to a hybrid developmental psychology.

The mereological fallacies

Conceptual fallacies that would threaten the possibility of a hybrid science are evident
in patterns of reasoning that make use of assumptions about the legitimacy of predica-
tions of common concepts both to parts of human beings and to whole individuals.
These are the mereological fallacies. The general form of a mereological fallacy is a
sense-destroying attribution of certain properties of parts to the wholes of which they
are components, and of certain properties of wholes to their constituent parts. The
senselessness of the use of a word both for a part and for the relevant whole arises from
the incompatibility of the criteria for the correct use of the word in each context, or, in
some cases, the meaninglessness of the focal word in one or the other context. The lat-
ter is the stronger complaint since it depends on the claim that the focal expression has
meaning only as ascribed to the whole of which it is a part (Harré & Llored, 2011).
Persons exist as living embodied beings that remember, think, act, and so on. Their
brains, if we are willing to agree for the sake of the argument, that these organs are
parts of a person, are not properly described as doing any of these things. “Thinking”
does not have a meaning in the context of human anatomy and physiology. Trying to
attribute thinking to a brain violates the grammar of “thinking.” So the question of
whether brains do or do not think cannot arise because the question we are trying to
pose—can brains think—eventuates in uttering an incoherent clump of words. Neither
“yes” nor “no” is an appropriate answer. There is a mirror image of this fallacy in the
attribution of words from the biological lexicon to persons. For example, we have such
malformed propositions as “Women prefer men who are the biologically fittest.” Here
the slippage is in the conventions for the use of the word “prefer.” Wittgenstein (1953)
made a convincing case for interpreting philosophical errors that show themselves in
intractable conceptual problems as stemming from mistakes about the “grammar” of
certain key words.

Bennett and Hacker’s version

The basic particulars for the science in question are higher animals, of which human
beings are the highest. It is the whole animal that thinks, suffers, loves, and so on. A

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634 Theory & Psychology 26(5)

mereological fallacy is committed in predicating properties of a whole animal to one or

more of its parts. Bennett and Hacker (2003) formulate the relevant mereological fallacy
as follows: “The principle that psychological predicates apply only to human beings (or
other animals) as wholes cannot intelligibly be applied to their parts, such as the brain,
we shall call ‘the mereological principle in neuroscience’” (p. 73).
The predicates in question have acquired their meaning in the context of their use for
the whole animal. Those who try to use a key word for both wholes and their parts must
presume a common meaning in both contexts as a necessary condition for the science of
the relevant part having anything to contribute to the science of the original whole. Only
if the word “intend” has a closely related meaning in the interpretation of studies of brain
states prior to intended actions could the results of such research as that by J.-D. Haynes
(2011) have anything to say about how people come to act in the ways they do. Bennett
and Hacker argue that the practice of seemingly sharing a vocabulary between neurosci-
ence and the relevant vernacular violates the conditions for a predicate meaningful in the
context of the whole, to be meaningful in the context of the part. This mereological fal-
lacy, according to Bennett and Hacker, is an obstacle to the claim of neuroscience to be
the fundamental ground of a scientific psychology. If the meaning of the word “suffer” is
established and maintained as it is customarily used to predicate some disagreeable psy-
chological state to a human being as higher animal, then it cannot be used to attribute that
state to any part of the human being in question. This precludes attributing pains to hands
as much as it does consciousness to brains. As mentioned above, Wittgenstein (1953)
argued that conceptual problems stem from mistakes about the “grammar” of certain key
terms. It is just such a mistake that underlies the commission of a mereological fallacy.
But isn’t it absurd to say of a body that it has pain? And why does one feel an absurd-
ity in that? In what sense is it true that my hand does not feel pain, but I in my hand?
What sort of issue is:

Is it the body that feels pain? How is it to be decided? What makes it possible to say that it is
not the body? Well, something like this: If someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does
not say so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into
his [sic] face. (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 286)

According to Hacker (2013), “person” is a forensic concept, brought into the discussion
when there are issues of praise and blame to be raised and perhaps settled.

My version
Adopting the line inaugurated by William Stern (1938) and Peter Strawson (1954), I take
the exemplary basic particular of the human world to be the person. The force of the
Bennett and Hacker criticism of cognitive neuroscience as committing a mereological
fallacy depends on the content of the part–whole relation they build their argument
around—the brain as a part of the human being. But is the brain a part of the person? The
accusation that ascribing a psychological attribute to my brain by the use of a word that
gets its meaning from its use to ascribe a psychological state or process to a person is
much stronger than Wittgenstein’s puzzled observation about one’s reluctance to sympa-
thize with an injured hand rather than with the person whose hand it is.

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Harré 635

On reflection one feels some uneasiness in identifying the mereological fallacy on the
basis of the principle that the brain is a part of the person in the same sense as a liver or
a hand is a part of a human body. For a start there are conceptual problems with the status
of isolated brains and hands disjoined from their original bodies, for example, the anthro-
pomorphism of the “hand” in the Addams Family saga. In the same way the pieces of
wood that are going to be or have been parts of a chair are not just seats, arms, and backs
in detachment from their role in a chair as a usable totality. Coming across a warehouse
of empty sacks and bins of beans may not strike us at first as a furniture factory. The
concept of “bean bag” as something to sit on is required. We should not take it for granted
that it is obvious that this lump of grey and white stuff of many parts and curious shapes
is the control system for a human body. When we find out its role in the body there is still
a gap between that insight and the assertion that the human brain is part of a person.
If we say that a brain is part of a person, and a brain is plainly part of a human body,
that body must be a part of the person to complete the transitive relationship. Brain and
body are both substances, so does not the application of the mereological principle
require that the person too is a substance? What, we may ask, is the other part of the
person if the brain is one of the person’s parts? It cannot be the totality of organic bits and
pieces that are the remnants of the mereological decomposition of the body. Ironically,
the mereological fallacy presented in the simple way above looks very like a version of
Cartesian dualism.
John Locke (1690) made the distinction between being a person and being a body.
While a man is an animated body, a person is a centre of consciousness, and, in one
sense, has no parts. Expressing Locke’s distinction between “the man” and “the person”
in the terminology of discursive psychology, we would say that the person is a singularity
that displays its mode of being as the spatio-temporal locus of a personal life in the
indexical role of devices such as pronouns, while the body is a material object with parts
that obey the laws of the mereology of material substances and as such is the referent of
certain adjectives, such as “heavy,” and established proper names, which retain their
power to refer to a human being, long after the person has departed. The brain-dead lump
of flesh on the life support system is still the bearer of the proper name, say “Terri
Sciavo,” when it is agreed that this body is no longer the site of a person.
An analysis of the pattern of concepts involved here tends to show that if the function
of the brain in the life of a human body is defined biologically, the brain is part of the
body as a living being. By contrast, the function of the brain in the life of a person is
defined by vernacular usage as an instrument or tool that that person uses for carrying out
certain tasks, almost all defined in relation to specific cultural contexts. Concepts such as
“tool” stand in various and diverse relations to the concepts used for describing material
parts of a human body, and in quite a different kind of relation to the person as active
agent, for example as “executioner” with his electric chair or “gardener” with his spade.
As a general rule the tools we use as persons are not parts of those persons, though they
are often parts of the relevant human body. When I return the spade to the garden shed I
do not put away a part of myself as a person. Asleep I am not using my brain for any of its
daytime tasks, but it remains as a body part. Conceptual problems with the programme of
neuroscience as psychology are more complex than simple violations of the basic mereo-
logical principle. One way of defusing this problem would be to take the human body to

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636 Theory & Psychology 26(5)

be a site for a person, a site that may or may not be occupied. The material site for a person
is not that person, any more than a site for a demonstration is a demonstration.

Semantic sources of the incoherence of cognitive neuroscience

Most of the words we use in everyday life and which also appear in our technical vocabu-
laries are to a greater or lesser degree polysemic. Wittgenstein (1953) called the results
of a careful description of the ways a word is used in many contexts, a field of family
resemblances. Each use is similar to but different from other uses. There may be some
uses of a word that are so different from one another that even though a chain of similari-
ties can be traced from the one to the other their actual uses have nothing in common. It
is a fallacy to presume that the rules for the use of a word in one context are the same as
those in another—each context must be studied in detail.
Suppose we set up a field of family resemblances for one of the words that seems to
be used both in the vernacular and in neuroscience. What sort of rupture in the semantic
network would endanger the programme of cognitive neuroscience by slipping into the
fatal fallacy of presuming that the rules for the use of the word in the context of everyday
life, from which all psychological semantics must start, are the same as those in its neu-
rophysiological use?
One source of the conceptual confusion underlying cognitive neuroscience involves
slides across the relevant semantic field, which obscure the difference between inten-
tional and automatic behaviour, between doing something deliberately for an envisaged
end and reacting to a situation, even if the reaction does serve a purpose. Only the former
requires the target of attribution to be a person and only intentional actions are relevant
to this chain of uses. However, the story of a human being’s reaction on a certain occa-
sion might be told neurophysiologically by reference to protective reflex arcs. “She rap-
idly retreated” could be said of instances of both kinds of doings—deliberate performances
and stimulus-response reactions. But the former is attributed to a person whose action
could be judged on such criteria as its moral quality, even though the person was not
conscious of having made a decision and the latter might go no further than an attribution
of a startle response to a human organism considered only as a body.
This is an example of a common source of conceptual infelicities where chains of
similarities and differences in use across the semantic field of a certain expression
obscures the difference between morally or normatively constrained and assessable
actions and non- or a-moral activities, described by the same word. “Remembering” is a
striking example. We need to construct an analysis of uses to show that vernacular use of
the words “memory” and “remembering” is generally morally loaded while the neu-
ropsychological use is morally neutral. This we can do by setting out some examples. For
instance “You ought not to rely on my memory”—with the moral implication that my
recollections should not be trusted, contrasted with the observation that the “entorhinal
cortex, the site of long term memory, has been damaged by a recent stroke, an event in
the speaker’s brain”—with no moral implications at all. Thus, a chain of family-resem-
bling usages for a great many psychological words, such as a word like “anger,” has a
vernacular anchor in which it is used to express a judgement with an indispensable
moral component, for example, that the way someone has treated me is demeaning.

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Harré 637

The activity in the chain of brain organs in the limbic system is amoral, just neuronal
firings. Only persons and their actions are subject to moral assessments, not their organs.
Indigestion is not a moral failing of one’s stomach, though the gluttony that induced it is
a moral failing of the person whose stomach it is. One kind of fatal semantic break in a
field of family resemblances occurs when the moral content of the vernacular origin of
the field is lost as the relevant word is used in neuro-scientific contexts. It follows that
the application of a word having its roots in the vernacular to the relevant brain organs
must involve the deletion of the moral element from its meaning. Is this a mereological
fallacy or a violation of the Humean rule that “is” and “ought” are logically independent?
It has the appearance of the commission of a mereological fallacy though when the dis-
course is looked at “close up” that appearance dissolves. However, it is a fallacy to
attribute something to a part of a person, say that person’s brain, when the words involved
get their meaning for their use for describing something about that person, because to do
so would violate the radical disjunction of moral and factual judgements that is a kind of
axiom of moral thinking.
The discourse of cognitive neuroscience is not just an example of a mereological fallacy
as Bennett and Hacker (2003) demonstrated but also a version of the fallacy, clearly deline-
ated by David Hume (1748/1777) and subsequently much discussed, of treating an “ought”
as if it were an “is,” that is failing to distinguish an evaluative use of a concept from an
empirical one. If such an inference were acceptable it would require that at least some pairs
of evaluative and empirical concepts are internally related. Holding fast to the insight that
no such relations can ever be coherent, a chain of meanings which starts in a vernacular
adjusted to the needs of everyday life must be ruptured when the chain reaches a use of the
“word” under examination which is held to be correct or incorrect on empirical grounds.
Being angry is a reaction to what a person discerns as a moral fault in the behaviour of
another—noting the existence of “anger” as a limbic system phenomenon is an empirical
matter. The disparity in the meanings of “anger” in the two contexts is radical.

The second mereological fallacy

There is another version of the mereological fallacy that has been important in philoso-
phy of chemistry, and has only recently been seen to have a role in clarifying the relation
of cultural psychology and neuroscience. The key concept that allows us to recognize the
fallacy in question comes from the psychology of perception (Gibson, 1979). A second
mereological fallacy is committed when affordances, what a situation enables a person
to do as described in everyday language, and its derivatives, are projected back onto the
brain as neural states and processes. This is a special case of the product to constituent
fallacy. This fallacy occurs when the internal constituents and structures of an entity are
inferred from the products of analytical procedures exercised on that entity violating
basic metaphysical distinctions, such as that between properties and substances, or dis-
positions and occurrent properties. The “products-to-constituents” inference is, however,
not always fallacious. Whether the inference is viable or fallacious depends on certain
ontological features of the context in which the inference is made. Inferring that the cogs
and gearwheels of a dismantled clock are parts of the original clock is not a fallacy
because they are all material entities, despite the subtle matter of how far function is
relocated to location in the whole machine. Ryle’s (1949) criticism of the attribution of

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638 Theory & Psychology 26(5)

“intelligence” to a person as a state or condition of the psyche could be seen as a reveal-

ing a “products-to-constituents” fallacy. Intelligence is an attribute of various activities
that people undertake in relation to various kinds of problems, all with a cultural location
and many with moral connotations. Whether the form “intelligence” is displayed depends
on the kind of problem solving in which it is discerned. “Intelligence” is a “product”
concept and so questionable when used as a “constituent concept.”
It is certainly true that the brain and nervous system of a person will be found to be in
a certain condition when that person is telling the story of what happened yesterday—
remembering—but it is a fallacy to call that state a memory and the neural activation
“remembering.” To remember something is to present a representation, verbal or iconic,
to oneself or more basically to others within the local conventions of what is to count as
a verisimilitudinous presentation. That involves the local moral order—how much
embroidery for effect is permissible or required? People rely on the verisimilitude of a
memory claim prefaced by “I remember …” and the speaker or writer can be criticized
for a moral fault as well as an epistemic failure if the report is inaccurate or a fantasy.
Children, therefore, have to learn to remember, that is, to distinguish a personal and
accurate record of what happened from various degrees of fantasy. The same line of
argument applies to all those psychological phenomena such as emotions that are estab-
lished as such in public meaningful activities.

What lies beneath

To see how these fallacies come to be revived and repeated we need to turn to another of
Wittgenstein’s insights. He pointed out that the source of an intractable problem that
continues to trouble the philosophical community for centuries, such as the “mind–body”
problem, may lie in the persistence of unexamined dichotomies that subtly shape the way
a discussion develops. His point is more than noting that the problem of how the body
and mind interact disappears if we cease to think that the seeming coherence between the
very different mental and material activities of a human being can be put down to the
mysterious union and interaction of correlated states of two disparate substances.
Abandon the interpretation of thinking and acting in terms of a dichotomy of substances,
one material and the other mental, and the interaction problem vanishes with it. In PI
§281, Wittgenstein (1953) points out that even though many philosophers and psycholo-
gists have abandoned the Cartesian dichotomy between “mind” and “body,” and choose
to base their metaphysics of humanity on the concept of “body,” the meaningfulness of
the default choice depends on the semantic content of the apparently abandoned Cartesian
dichotomy. To go forward we need to abandon even the rump of the Cartesian distinc-
tion. So we turn to such distinctions as “living”/“dead,” “thinking”/“reacting,” and so on.
Many examples of such dichotomies appear in the Philosophical Investigations
(Wittgenstein, 1953). There is no place for the default concept of “body” (aka “matter”)
if there is no place for a concept of a substantive “mind” (aka “spirit”).

The grammars of psychological discourses

In studying the practices of a culture we need to pay close attention to the rules for the
construction of meaningful discourses, discourses that do not slide into incoherence

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Harré 639

while the speakers and writers of that culture still proceed as if what they were express-
ing made sense. In relation to the fallacies that I have diagnosed and the sources of which
I have discussed, we can make a distinction between several different and distinct dis-
course genres, distinguished by the type of item that is taken to be unanalysable and so
basic to the relevant story-type. Drawing on the previous discussion and examining the
way we think, talk, and write in everyday life, we can identify four kinds of basic beings:
soul, person, organism, and molecule. Contemporary Western ways of life, conceived in
terms of the discourses that are used by people to manage their parts in them, seem to be
shaped by four grammars each grounded in a root presumption about one of these cate-
gories of entity.

A person or P-grammar
In which persons are the basic particulars and originating sources of activity. It com-
prises the tribal dialects and idiolects of everyday life. Among some of the specialized
dialects of this generic grammar are the idioms of the courtroom, Freudian psychother-
apy, football, and so on. A main feature of P-grammars is the way that responsibility is
dealt with (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003). This is particularly important for a philosophy
of psychology, since the course of the transition from infancy to maturity of a being that
has native agentive powers and acts teleologically occurs along the dimension of grow-
ing responsibility for what it does.
Hart and Honoré (1985) cite three necessary conditions for an attribution of moral
responsibility to a being and so include a tacit presumption of personhood: that the
person should understand what is required, that the person has deliberated on the mat-
ter in hand, and that the person conforms to the result of the deliberation. To meet these
conditions, and so to be acting as a person, a nascent human being must have acquired
certain skills.

A molecular or M-grammar
In which molecules and molecular clusters are the basic particulars and originating
sources of activity. Among the dialects shaped by M-grammar is human physiology and
molecular biology. Discourse framed in this grammar includes such attributions of
agency to molecules, such as, the (alleged) powers of melatonin to put one to sleep (in
the sense of a change in brain rhythms) and excess stomach acid to cause heartburn (in
the sense of discharges in the pain receptors). Unlike the P-grammar, the M-grammar is
strongly hierarchical and displays emergent properties at every level. All kinds of prac-
tices depend on a core of M-grammar beliefs. For example, tennis players believe that
digesting a banana provides them with instant energy via laevulose, that an injection of
cortisone will reduce the inflammation in cartilage, and so on.

Organism or O-grammar
Current Western discourses make use of a third grammar, an organism or O-grammar, in
which the basic powerful particulars are organisms. While it has, so to speak, its natural

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domain of application in discussions about animals, it has some important uses in dis-
course about human beings. Animals are agentive and act teleologically, while molecules
do not, yet animals do not act intentionally in the full sense that would bring into play the
grammar of responsibility attributions, that is the P-grammar, except in rare cases.
Responsibility talk addressed to family pets is surely metaphorical. When addressed to
certain primates, such as domesticated chimpanzees, it may have a deeper significance,
widening the scope of the domain of moral agents. We also use responsibility grammar
for talking about, though not usually to, neonates. Babies act for an end but surely not for
a purpose.

Spiritual or S-grammar
Finally, in many contemporary cultures there is a fourth grammar, the spiritual or
S-grammar, in common use. The basic categories are God, the soul, sin, heaven or para-
dise, and so on. To jihadists and fundamentalist Christians this grammar is an acceptable
and unquestioned way of shaping one’s thoughts and actions.
Taken together, a loose cluster of the S, P, O, and M-grammars sets the standards of
proper discourse for the human domain. Each has variants, and in certain circumstances
they fit together into hierarchies, and, in other circumstances, they complement one
another. These grammars must be mastered by the developing human being. From the
Sunday service to the football ground, to health food advice and to the understanding of
labels on food items, to the decision whether to join a religious institution, a mature per-
son must have a mastery of these grammars, though there is much variation on how
detailed a comprehension is required to manage everyday life. We do not need to master
the theory of molecular orbitals to take note of the role of antioxidants in maintaining
good health. Nor do we need to be biblical scholars to become Sunday school teachers.
These are not only the grammars in play in the discourses of most of the people of the
21st century; they are also or ought to be the main structuring systems of the human sci-
ences. In this discussion I am concerned only with the reiteration of the P-, M-, and
O-grammars as shaping the discourse of human sciences, both cultural and biological.
The role of the S-grammar in the sciences is a matter for further discussion. Not every-
one, even in the agnostic West, would wish to exclude it altogether from a role in shaping
scientific discourse.1

The task–tool metaphor as a mapping

How are these apparently incommensurable fields of meaning (for example, the meaning
of “fear” as a cultural phenomenon subject to moral judgements such as “cowardice,”
and the meaning of “fear” as a state of the body), linked in more comprehensive dis-
courses? The criteria of identity that are used to pick out psychologically relevant phe-
nomena in the brain and nervous system come from the vernacular psychological
vocabulary (in practice most psychology worldwide is published in English whatever the
vernaculars of the investigators). We only know what we should call a process we have
observed in the hippocampus when a person is carrying out a task according to the local
meaning of “remembering,” if we have mastered the local concept of the process of

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Harré 641

“remembering.” Is the activity constrained by a desire to please, to confuse an enquirer,

or to reveal the past? The social component of the meaning of remembering is crucial to
an understanding of how the concept is used. The identification of a brain process related
to the cognitive-social practice of claiming to remember something can only be top-
down. Having discovered a correlation can we then move on to a reduction of the one to
the other?
Mental processes, such as deciding to throw a ball, seem to lead to material processes;
the hand and arm moving in such a way as to project the ball into something like the
trajectory the thrower intends. Injuries to the body seem to be the cause of painful sensa-
tions. Molecules of salicylic acid (aspirin) seem to be effective in eliminating that pain
and so on, through a huge catalogue of ways that the mental aspects of a person’s being
are interrelated with the material aspects. If we are pressed to ask a developmental ques-
tion it might be something like this: Is human development a matter of the maturation of
the brain and nervous system which then makes cultural practices possible, or is it the
need to take part in cultural practices that leads to development in the brain and nervous
system? We do not have to learn to walk, but only if we can walk can there be Olympic
Games. On the other hand, in a well-known study, Tsuboda (1985) showed that there
were different brain structures in those who spent their childhood learning to write
Japanese from those who learned to write English. Is there some way of linking P-, M-,
and O-grammars into a coherent super-psychology?
But, as Wittgenstein aptly put it, we have crossed a threshold into a region of insoluble
problems; the resolution of our troubles is to back out through the doorway since we did
not have to come in this way. Trying to understand human life by means of the mind-
body distinction as a matter of the grounding metaphysics of human sciences must be
abandoned. There are many other dichotomous possibilities such as “private/public,”
“dead/alive,” “honest/dishonest,” and so on, with which we can bring manageable order
to the flux of human life. And each of these alternatives links the basic grammars in dif-
ferent ways.

Rethinking the problem

The project of setting up a hybrid science, in which the symbol-using capacities of human
beings are brought into a unified scheme with the organic aspects of members of the spe-
cies homo sapiens, demands the dissolution of the mind–body problem, somehow setting
it aside as an illusion, based on a mistaken presupposition. The trick upon which the
possibility of a unified cognitive science depends is to shift the focus from entities to
discourses. The issue is one of grammars for two pairs of intelligible discourses, social-
cultural and chemical-neurological, and their relations. We have already encountered the
leading idea with which the unification of the whole field of psychologically relevant
discourses is to be accomplished; the metaphor of cognitive tasks and neural tools. It is,
however, not the only candidate for a unifying principle.
Having shifted the focus of our enquiries from the misconceived puzzle about how
two wholly disjointed substances could interact, and avoiding the complementary pitfall
of the attempt to build a human science on the basis of one or other of these alleged sub-
stances exclusively, we can turn to examine ways in which the Person-based discourse,

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the Organism-based discourse, and the Molecule-based discourse are related to one
another. It seems to me that there are at least three ways in which links are in fact estab-
lished between these ways of talking that currently dominate the discourses of the human
form of life. There is the Task–Tool metaphor by which tasks defined in terms of the
P-discourse are accomplished by tools described in terms of the O- and M-discourses.
Then there is the way in which dispositions and powers defined in the P-discourse are
grounded in structures, states, and processes described in O- and M-discourse terms. The
third link comes about through the way that classificatory systems applicable to the enti-
ties, states, and processes describable in the O- and M-discourses are dependent on clas-
sifications of beings which are identified in the first instance as belonging to types
defined in the P-discourse. In this discussion I propose to content myself with an exami-
nation only of the way that the Task–Tool metaphor can throw light on how the develop-
ment of skill in cultural practices is to be linked to the maturation of the brain and nervous
system of a developing human being.

Cultural task and material tool: TT

The idea that cognitive tasks often require the use of material tools has fundamental
relevance to psychology and is based on the metaphor of “brain-as-tool.” Consider first
of all the ways we human beings carry out certain cognitive tasks, such as adding up a
bill. We are accustomed to think of a pocket calculator as a tool for doing sums. But since
that gadget is a prosthetic device, accomplishing cognitive tasks formerly performed by
our brains, it seems entirely appropriate to apply the same concept to the brain, or a rel-
evant region of it, when we are engaged in performing the cognitive task without using a
prosthesis. A certain electronic device is a “calculator” only in relation to the task it is
used to perform.
Material tasks also engage persons as agents. There too we make use of material tools.
Some of these are prostheses for body parts other than the neurological. For digging we
need spades. They are prostheses for hands, to which, in the absence of spades, we are
obliged to have recourse, even now. Pieces of iron are “spades” only in relation to the
task they are devised to perform. There are also some tools which far outstrip their pros-
thetic ancestors, for both cognitive and material tasks. Bulldozers are spades of a sort,
but of another order altogether when the task at hand is shifting earth. The same is true
of computing machines when the task at hand is arithmetical or the reliable storage of
vast amounts of data.
Finally, there are cognitive tasks for which we use cognitive or symbolic tools, for
instance reasoning carried on with propositions. At this point the simple “task
(P-grammar)/tool (M-grammar)” scheme seems to be in need of further development. To
produce a statement, expressing a proposition, which is to serve as a tool in the task of
solving a problem, is to engage in a task using a material tool; one’s brain. Here we seem
to have the use of a tool to produce a tool. This, too, is a metaphor with a familiar origin
in industry. What advantages does the task/tool metaphor have over ways of expressing
the role of O- and M-entities and states as enabling conditions for P-activities? People do
not generally talk of their brains as tools. However, the point of introducing a metaphor
is to extend the power of the existing language to cope with new insights and situations.

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Harré 643

Boundaries that seem to be impenetrable need to be examined. The metaphor of body

parts as tools seems unproblematic in such a piece of advice: “If you can’t find a trowel,
use your hand to scoop out a hole to plant the seedling.” The idea of “tool and task”
seems already to be fully formed in the common injunction to someone stuck in some
problem: “Use your loaf!” meaning “Use your head [brains].” “Brain as a tool” is the
scientifically innovative or creative concept that comes from the extensions of the “Use
your …” metaphor inviting us to look on our brains in a new way. Philosophical justifica-
tion can be found in the prosthesis argument set out above. The calculator, electronic
organizer, and even one’s pocket diary, are tools for cognitive tasks (although there are
cognitive skills required to use them). In the same manner we can use our brains as pros-
theses for prostheses, stand-ins for “extrinsic” cognitive tools by, for example, trying to
remember the appointments recorded in a mislaid diary. The brain or one of its modules
is functionally equivalent to something which it is not at all controversial to classify as a
tool.
In adopting the task–tool metaphor as the basis for a scientific psychology, it would
be natural to construe neural mechanisms as tools for performing mental tasks. Successful
projects in AI can also be recruited to the project of cognitive science, as the source of
schematic representations of the material properties of the tools used in discursively
defined projects. Since many of these tools are material systems found at various levels
in the brain, the AI models can, in some cases, serve as the source of important and per-
haps testable hypotheses about brain architecture and brain functions.

Psychology as a hybrid science

Having looked at one of the ways in which the P-, O-, and M-grammars can be bound
together into a comprehensive conceptual system fit to serve as the basis of a science, the
Task–Tool metaphor, the next step will be to turn to the kind of science that will thereby
be made possible. Since doing psychology is a human activity, the same principles should
apply to it as to any other pattern of action which realizes well-established storylines. If
psychology is a cluster of narrations, then what are the relevant grammars? It would
surely be unacceptable to most psychologists to describe their professional activities in
the O- and M-grammar. Only if presented in the frame of the P-grammar could credit be
claimed for a successful research project, since only in a frame in which the concept of
“person” picks out the basic active particulars does the concept of responsibility have a
place, and hence the concept of credit.
There is, in a sense, only one stream of action. As described in the P-grammar, it dis-
plays such phenomena as “emotions,” “attitudes,” “memories,” “items of knowledge,”
“performance of athletic feats,” and so on. Using the metaphor of a stream we might
think of these phenomena as eddies, whirlpools, froth, and waves in the continuous flow
that dries up only on the brain death of the actor. Some are ephemeral and others more
enduring.
In setting up an empirical science, one begins by distinguishing the kinds of beings
with which the study is concerned. Thus a science starts with rudimentary classification
schemes, which have the form of type-hierarchies. The creation of the most fundamental
type-hierarchy expresses the cognitive constraints we must accept on all thinking in that

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science. Such constraints evolve, but like Wittgenstein’s rocky riverbed, only slowly. For
the new generation of discursive psychologists intent on promoting a complementary
research relationship with neuroscience, the basic particular, the ontological rock, on
which all else is founded, is the person.

Tennis, music, and emotion as exemplars of practices that demand a

hybrid explanation format
The game is a social invention, with explicit rules and meanings embedded in an open
matrix of tacit understandings. To play tennis certain tools are needed: a court (grass,
clay, tarmac, etc.), racquets, and balls. To understand how these behave certain fragments
of physics are required; ballistics, Hooke’s law of elastic strings, Newton’s Laws of
motion and impact, and so on, applied to highly specific physical situations. The players
also use their bodies as tools, training them for the specific tasks of the tennis game.
Sport science as a branch of physiology is needed to understand the way the bodies of
tennis players can be used for the purpose at hand.
We sharpen saws. We also work on at least some of the items in the body/brain tool
kit. The power of public cultural conventions to shape the workings of the cerebral tool
kit is nicely illustrated in the transformation of European music that occurred in the 18th
century. The basis of most music worldwide is the harmonic series, the Circle of Fifths.
Starting with the diatonic scale the tonic and fifth pitches can be repeated and the series
is identified by the cochlea and the auditory system as perfectly harmonic. However, if
we hear a low note with which the Circle begins it is dissonant with a pitch at the top of
the Circle. The natural scale is not harmonious overall. J. S. Bach, among others, set
about popularizing the equitempered scale, in which, by a small adjustment to the fre-
quency of the notes of the Circle of Fifths, the whole scale pattern is made harmonious,
or almost. Modern people in the West are brought up with the equitempered scale which
sounds perfectly harmonious. Somewhere in the auditory system a neural adjustment has
been established so that a person hears the music of the post-Bach Western traditions as
perfectly harmonious. Not so those with perfect pitch! Their primary, secondary, and
tertiary auditory neural structures are immune to retraining. We have acquired a tool for
interpreting sounds as music. Just as we can dig the garden while thinking of something
else, so often we come to hear a tune without looking for the Schenkerian structure of
tonics and fifths, though sometimes the task of hearing a sequence of sounds as a melody
may require the conscious use of the musical skills.
There are many ways in which the lives of human beings at all times and places have
been similar—being parents, being in danger, lacking something others have, and so on.
It is also evident that there are physiological reactions to situations that are felt in the
body—anger, fear, grief, love, lust, and so on. Yet, close examination of the way these
features of life play out in different cultures discloses a close link between local forms of
emotions and the vernacular of the tribe in question. How would the emotional lives of
people be analysed using the Task–Tool metaphor? Someone wants to express outrage
and they do so by displaying anger; that is, giving an anger performance as it is recog-
nized in their culture. Someone wants to express grief; they do so by giving a grief per-
formance again within the conventions of their local society. There are a number of

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Harré 645

refinements that enrich the metaphor. “Want to” may sometimes be “needs to” and even
sometimes “pretends to.”
The details of how these “skills” develop can be researched by making use of Lev
Vygotsky’s (1978) “zone of proximal development.” The young child learns the proper
local expressions of attitudes and reactions to situations in life by copying the perfor-
mances of more socially skilled people—psychological symbiosis, or as Jerome Bruner
(1983) called it, “scaffolding.” The Task–Tool metaphor fits Vygotsky’s conception of
the Zone of Proximal Development very neatly. In learning a cognitive or practical skill,
standards are involved as the junior member of the Vygotskian dyad picks up the skills
of the senior member.
However, the primary and secondary auditory cortices undergo structural changes as
musical skills are learned. The neural tool is shaped by the requirements of the cultural
task. Vygotsky himself understood this very well, in setting out the basic principles of
cultural-historical-instrumental psychology. The Vygotskian research framework pro-
vides the necessary starting point for any research that will enable researchers to identify
the neural processes that are activated when a person sets about acquiring the skills for
everyday life and using them in increasingly competent ways in carrying out culturally-
specified tasks. How can cultural practices be prior to neural processes? Because it is a
core principle of Vygotskian developmental psychology that the cultural practices that
are sources of personal skills are attributes of social groups, especially the family. These
are what individuals draw on to acquire the main features of their necessary skills. And
in so doing they facilitate the development of the necessary neural equipment.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Note
1. There are many people who enjoy Richard Dawkins’ rhetoric without subscribing to his radi-
cal atheism.

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Author biography
Rom Harré was until recently Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences
at the London School of Economics and was for many years the University Lecturer in Philosophy
of Science at Oxford and Fellow of Linacre College. He is currently Distinguished Professor in the
Psychology Department of Georgetown University in Washington DC and is Honorary President
of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry. His publications include, amongst
others, Causal Powers (with E. H. Madden), The Explanation of Social Behaviour (with P. F.
Secord), and Cognitive Science: A Philosophical Introduction.

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