Embodied Knowing, Judgment, and the Limits of Neurobiology

Abstract

My response to John Hibbing raises questions about the nature of judgment implied in the biology and politics agenda that he would have us adopt. Although rightly critical of overly rationalist and cognitivist models, the neurobiological turn casts action and judgment as the mere effects of already primed dispositions, for which the giving of reasons is little more than window-dressing on what was going to happen in any case. Furthermore, the reductively biological picture of human beings that emerges in Hibbing's account is hard to square with democratic conceptions of politics that emphasize the capacity for freedom and association with others. Finally, I worry that Hibbing's unapologetic embrace of scientism remains entangled in the fraught history of deterministic explanatory models and American social science.