I am no scientist, but I have thought some about the logical structure of science as a mode of human understanding or experience.  A friend raised the issue of neuroscience’s ability to address the tendencies of conservatives and liberals to think in characteristic ways, in a discussion on Civitas: http://civitasterrena.wordpress.com.

I would venture to say the following about neuroscience.  I doubt very much that neuroscience’s findings will match up with the dichotomies of American politics, unless there has been some very recent and significant evolutionary change in the peoples inhabiting the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  Our “wiring” predates by a long time our politics.  Pari passu any other country.  Maybe neuroscience would uncover some truly universal patterns in political thinking.  Well maybe.  The problem here is that such an explanation is not only on the wrong scale to be of interest in understanding politics (e.g., too broad, or general); it is in the wrong MODE:  It would be an explanation in terms of measurable patterns (brain waves, centers of electro-chemical activity, etc) which takes no account of human agency; that is, no account of human beings as creatures who understand themselves and act according to those understandings (by choosing to do this or that in response to contingent, understood situations). Instead, it would conceive those human beings to be indifferent examples of a general phenomena, “cases” of general “types” (in a way analogous to the chemist’s indifference toward this or that atom of hydrogen — what he is describing is true of all of the atoms, ergo, equally true of this one, that one, and so on).  This is not wrong, nor dehumanizing.  It isn’t really proper to speak of human beings at all, in fact, but of patterns of brain activity.  Most importantly, those patterns are understood in the mode of science to be non-chosen; to be not the product of understandings on the part of human agents.  The real challenge might even be put this way:  Since at least the time of Aristotle, an argument has existed that not every manner of being active as a human being is “politics”; that politics refers only to a narrow range and specific kind of activity; and, that it is distinct from household management, economic exchange, love, and many other types of activity.  There are various views of what this distinct activity is, and there are off-shoots of the argument such as the inference that some societies do not know a political mode of being at all.  Where the tribe’s elders decide a tiny range of questions by reference solely to ancestral practices; where a dynasty is ruled as an extension of the emperor’s household, where a Pharoah is held as god, or where a council of mullahs holds real power and authority, there can be no serious question of deliberation in common among peers (citizens) who determine for themselves what shall be their common good.  Now, if neuroscience could affirm that there is a state of mind that is political, i.e., that brain patterns can be closely correlated with the self-descriptions of political agents; and, if it could further define when and where it is occurring, that would be interesting.  However, I suspect that even this level of specification is beyond the ambit of modern science.  What I think neuroscience will describe is something much broader than “politics” (to say nothing of blue-dog democrats’ opposition to the health care reform bill).  To put it differently:  what would be a more interesting scientific finding?  that here is a “political” sphere, or that all human emotions and all human reasonings occur in the same three or six lobes of the brian?  The former would only be interesting if it rested on a mathematically specifiable difference — if in other words it was real for science — and if the boundary were as firm as that between other scientific areas of concern; such as between nutrition and genetics.  And of course, those divisions tend continually to be broken down, as ever larger sections of our understood world are unified or synthesized; i.e, it is more interesting to know that every living creature has genetic codes and define species in relation to this common (but varied) code, than to have speciation based only upon the observed evidence of natural historians and breeders.  So, I am not hopeful that neuroscience will produce anything of relevance to either political scientists or practicing politicians.  You can destroy an atom of hydrogen and it is just an experiment; destroy a Churchill, or destroy the independence of the judiciary, and you change the very nature of the object of your study.