Mirror, Mirror in the Brain, What’s the Interdisciplinary Interaction for my Domain: A description of the emergence of mirror neuron empathy as a case of neuroscience imperialism facilitated by disciplinary bridging

Abstract

My aim in this thesis is to describe the emergence of mirror neuron empathy as an important research program within social neuroscience through a suitable description of the interdisciplinary interactions that were constitutive of its history.

As a discipline that defines itself in terms of interdisciplinarity between social psychology and neuroscience, social neuroscience follows a classical theoretical framework for interdisciplinarity, which I have termed CIPI (/Classic Integrative Picture of Interdisciplinarity). Because mirror neuron empathy is considered one of the foundational research programs of social neuroscience, the CIPI framework seemed to be an obvious candidate for its description in terms of interdisciplinarity. However, a closer inspection of the history of early mirror neuron empathy reveals that the scientific practice of the development of mirror neuron empathy is not consistent with the CIPI-ideal set out by its parent discipline. Firstly, contrary to social neuroscience’s self-concept, the early history of mirror neuron empathy was not characterized by a CIPI-style interaction between social psychology and neuroscience. Instead, the first theory of mirror neuron empathy was constructed by a transitory interaction with philosophy. Furthermore, early successors of this theory did not display interaction with any other non-neuroscientific discipline. Secondly, I established that this history is not only incommensurable with social neuroscience’s self-concept, but that it cannot accurately be described as a CIPI interaction at all. Briefly put, what happened in the practice of the development of mirror neuron empathy does not line up with the theoretical expectations about its interdisciplinarity.

This inadequacy of CIPI for my descriptive purpose leads me to introduce an alternative, empirically based framework for interdisciplinarity, mainly based on Uskali Mäki’s work. This new framework attempts to close the chasm between theoretical notions of interdisciplinarity, and its manifestation within actual scientific practice. Using this framework, I introduce a new notion of ‘interdisciplinarity’ defined as a spectrum that contains a range of different subtypes of interdisciplinary interaction. One of the subtypes, namely scientific imperialism, I considered to be especially relevant for my case study. After distilling some descriptive tools from Mäki’s framework for scientific imperialism, I recount the early history of mirror neuron empathy through this new practical framework for interdisciplinarity while making use of the vocabulary of scientific imperialism. I described the emergence of mirror neuron empathy in two stages:

First by its transitory interaction with philosophy, which I term ‘disciplinary bridging’. Through this first step, neuroscience could bypass the discipline of social psychology in its first formulation of a mirror neuron theory of empathy, while still entering the social domain. Secondly, I claim that this bridging mechanism facilitated (neuro)scientific imperialism of social psychology within the domain of social neuroscience. I describe some of the details of early mirror neuron empathy using Mäki’s framework while connecting these observations to the bridging mechanism. This final description will lead me to claim that the emergence of mirror neuron empathy is best described using a practical framework for interdisciplinarity, which allows for its description as a case of neuroscience imperialism facilitated by disciplinary bridging through philosophy.