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Does Steven Pinker think with his stomach?

Pinker uses the fact that a person with a severed corpus callosum will show signs of being of two minds, as it were. One side will act according to one inclination and the other according to another. The side responsible for saying why one acts as one does ingeniously fabricate a pseudo holistic account. I can't get into the details now, b/c it's a while since I heard it, but it's a very worthwhile argument against the position I hold.

My question to SP would be, however, as follows: since we use neurons not only in the brain but also in the stomach (to help direct churning activity), does he think that our stomach thinks? Perhaps the maxim "follow your guts" has special significance for Pinker...

Furthermore, in basing his theory of mind on this exceptional case, Pinker is behaving like the Chinese astronomers who noted only the exceptional events (e.g., super novae), not the regular ones. He still needs to give an account for the normal unity of human thought/affection/action, which we can abbreviate as simply human agency. What is most amazing is not that things get out of wack in the special cases noted by Pinker, but that all these different physiological events (neuron firiing here, neurotransmitter acting there, etc.) are all components of what is in fact one human event: agency). To a reductionist, such unity is illusory... but of course Pinker tells us he is a "good" reductionist (reminiscent of the good witch in the Wizard of Oz)... but he offers a rather thin account of what he means by "good reductionism," one that leaves us without any understanding of how the unity of human operation is even possible.

Instead, SP justifies his understanding of the human psyche on events that have happened only a few times in the history of humanity, like a lawmaker who justifies legislation on exceptional cases.

My critique of him, however, won't be complete until I go to googlebooks and do a word search for 'corpus collosum" in the Blank Slate.

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