Rhetoric, Neuroscience, and the Nonhuman

Abstract for SLSA Conference:

This paper reflects on the rhetoric of animal and human studies in affective neuroscience. I begin with a narrative about methodological struggles involving behaviorist B.F. Skinner, neuroscientist Jak Panksepp, and neuropsychologist Richard Lane. The narrative introduces a tension between experimental methods as a function of ethos in this hybrid field.

One of the interesting structural features of affective neuroscience as a field of inquiry is that animal studies produce methodological imperatives to which human studies cannot aspire for ethical reasons, while the onto-teleological focus on human affect tacitly supports the inhumane treatment on nonhumans. In some quarters of neuroscience, for example, only animal studies are considered legitimate because they provide direct proof of neurogenesis (via autopsy). In other quarters animal studies are considered arcane because researchers accept indirect evidence of neurogenesis, available through PET scans and fMRI.

What interests me primarily are the underlying assumptions of the two camps. Animal scientists regard their “hard” evidence as more real than the “soft” evidence of PET scans and the like, reproducing inherited value distinctions. (But this is an old and tired critique.) On the other hand, scientists who privilege human experience as the proper subject or end of neuroscience privilege human “creatureliness” in a way that tacitly supports animal experimentation. What would an affective neuroscience uninterested in the differences between human and other creatureliness look like? What scientific assumptions would it challenge and what kind of methodologies might it produce? And how would it discipline techno-science not only ethically but epistemologically?