Research
Philosophy of Neuroscience
I defend a contextualist approach to functional description and localization in the brain. On this view, parts of the brain are genuinely multifunctional. In previous work, I argued that contextualism is an empirically adequate view, which grounds limited generalizability and projectabiity.
In recent papers I have applied the contextualist framework to the problem of functionally decomposing brain networks, the issues of reductionism and mechanistic explanation, and the nature of neural representations
In ongoing work, I have begun thinking about what all of this means for the problem of cognitive ontology, i.e., how to individuate psychological kinds. I am enamored of a view on which psychological kinds are not themselves explanantia, but only guides towards what is genuinely explanatory -- the way in which brain networks are organized in real time to function in particular task contexts.
- Burnston, D. C. (2022). Mechanistic Decomposition and Reduction in Complex, Context-Sensitive Systems. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 992347.
- Burnston, D. C. (2021.) Contents, Vehicles, and Complex Data Analysis in Neuroscience. Synthese (199) 1617-1639.
- Burnston, D. C. (2021). Cognitive Ontologies, Task Ontologies, and Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience. J. Bickle, A.S. Barwich, and C. Craver (Eds.) The Tools of Neuroscience Experiment: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives.
- Burnston, D. C. (2021). Getting over Atomism: Functional Decomposition in Complex Neural Systems. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(3), 743-772.
- Burnston, D. C., & Haueis, P. (2021). The Multiple Senses of "Hierarchy" in Systems Neuroscience. F. Calzavarini and M. Viola (Eds.), Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in Philosophy of Neuroscience (pp. 113-141). Springer.
- Burnston, D. C. (2016). Computational neuroscience and localized neural function. Synthese, 193(12), 3741-3762. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-016-1099-8.
- Burnston, D. C. (2016). A contextualist approach to functional localization in the brain. Biology & Philosophy, 31(4), 527-550.
- Uithol, S., Burnston, D. C., and Haselager, P. (2014). Why we may not find intentions in the brain. Neuropsychologia, 56, 129-139.