ABSTRACT
The author clusters criticisms under five headings: methodological, conceptual, theoretical, political, and educational. Of a more purely philosophical nature are the criticisms that neuroscience is founded on conceptual confusions about making inferences concerning thoughts or the mind based on observations about activity in the brain. Philosophers call this a category error. Clarence Joldersma attributes this error to a series of assumptions inherent to the neuroscience research program. The particular ways that neuroscience research gets interpreted at the level of policy, and implemented at the level of practice reinforces these trends and creates false expectations about the perfectibility of learning and the learner. The trends in neuroscience, one might say, are anti-Coleman: reducing educational problems to brain problems and suggesting that scientifically grounded instructional techniques can fix learning. Moreover, plasticity research is also discovering how to deliberately enhance brain plasticity can easily become a competing discourse, framing problematic political and economic differences as natural and internal.
