@NicoleCRust @brembs @DrYohanJohn @WorldImagining

Sorry if I'm not including everyone here.

I think we need more jargon in neuroscience (mind/brain).

Couple of examples. Examine the mess that is the debate about "consciousness" because (in part) so many senses are mixed, including "sentience", "awareness", etc.

Or the fact that we use basically folk psychological terms all the time. So even if qualify what I mean by attention* in one of my papers, using a term that is used in a dozen ways will surely lead to confusion.

Our mind/brain field is highly technical, but the language surprisingly accessible to most people. That's a problem not because we want to be "distinguished professors" but because of the complete terminological confusion we inhabit!

I couldn't read all the discussion, so apologies if this was already discussed and debunked... 🙂

#neuroscience

@PessoaBrain @NicoleCRust @brembs @DrYohanJohn
Some counter-examples from fields where terms do have strict definitions yet use words which also have a wide range of everyday meanings (i.e. are not "jargon" per se): mass, power, gravity, element, compound, volume...

I think it's useful to reflect on how *unproblematic* the technical use of these terms is as opposed to, say, "consciousness" or "attention." The problem then reduces to an absence of strict definitions more than to polysemy.

@WorldImagining @PessoaBrain @NicoleCRust @brembs

I think physical concepts like mass etc aren't fraught with all the cultural baggage of psychological terms. Few people have strong opinions on what "volume" means, but many have some notion of what "emotion", "thinking", or "attention" mean.

The case of "representation" is exemplary and doesn't bode well: people who explicitly disavow a symbolic Fodorian notion of representation have to endlessly reassert this when Gibsonians are around. 😅