Great Ideas of Philosophy

C. Though his system would be mocked as “bumpology” and later appear as a kind of charlatanism or parlorgame, Gall was, in fact, one of the great neuroanatomists of his time and established his theory withcompelling evidence.1. He examined changes in brain mass of human fetuses spontaneously aborted during various periods ofgestation, thus laying the foundations for human developmental neuroanatomy.2. He made similar observations of the non-human species, thus carrying further the specialty ofcomparative neuroanatomy.3. He made studies of the cranial features of living celebrities, criminals, mental defectives, and insanepatients and of their brains after they had died.D. On the basis of a substantial database, he offered what he called “four incontestable truths”:1. Every mental and moral faculty of the mind is associated with a specific “organ”—a functional unit orwhat today might be called a module—in the brain.2. The degree of a faculty that a person possesses is associated with the relative mass of brain connectedto that faculty.3. The mental and moral faculties are innate—by moral, Gall means the temperamental and dispositional.4. The conformation of the adult skull provides at least a good first approximation to the dominant ordeficient moral and intellectual faculties of the underlying brain, thus, of the person.III. It would be but a matter of a few years before physiologists begin to test Gall’s theory directly, putting Franceat the center of the field that would become psychobiology or physiological psychology.A. The technique of choice—practiced by Francois Magendie and Xavier Bichat, among others—was tosurgically destroy selective regions of the brains of unanesthetized animals and observe among thesurvivors whatever deficits were produced by destruction of areas of the brain.B. In the early 1840s, Pierre Flourens performed such research and published his findings, along with acareful critique, in his Phrenology Examined.1. Flourens discovered that the areas of the brain Gall had linked with certain functions were notidentified with those functions.2. But Flourens’s work did show evidence of just the sort of localized function that was at the center ofGall’s theory.C. Gall had put on the map of scientific thought a problem that continues to animate current cognitive andbrain research—localization of function.IV. Though phrenology proved a waste, Gall’s larger achievement was to rescue philosophy of mind fromspeculative philosophy and locate it in the sciences. He played an important part in the emergence ofpsychology as an independent experimental discipline.A. The speculative approach of Locke or Hume was now complemented, if not replaced, by clinical andexperimental inquiries into the relationship between psychic and physical processes. From a few suggestivestudies to what arose as a veritable movement, the “brain sciences” would take on profound philosophicalimportance.B. If Gall is not the father of that movement, he is surely one of it most influential modern tutors.Recommended Reading:Borst, C. V., ed. Mind/Brain Identity Theory. New York, 1970.Robinson, D. The Enlightened Machine. New York, 1980.Churchland, P. Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, 1986.Questions to Consider:1. If salient aspects of human mental and emotional life are conditional on particular states and processes in thebrain, explain why anyone should be held responsible either for knowledge or for conduct.2. Infer what Descartes might have said about Gall’s theory.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 3