How Has Neuroscience Affected Lay Understandings of Personhood?, by O'Connor and Joffe

In a review published in 2013, Cliodhna O’Connor and Helene Joffe examined the empirical evidence for three frequent claims: that neuroscience fosters a conception of the self based in biology, that it promotes conceptions of individual fate as predetermined, and that it attenuates the stigma attached to particular social categories. They concluded that “claims that neuroscience will dramatically alter people’s relations with their selves, others and the world are overstated. In many cases, neuroscientific ideas have been assimilated in ways that perpetuate rather than challenge existing modes of understanding” (O’Connor and Joffe 2013, 262).

Vidal, Fernando and Ortega, Francisco. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (Forms of Living) (...

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Obtained from: www.swarthmore.edu/profile/scott-gilbert

Cliodhna O'Connor at University College Dublin

Helen Joffe at University College London