Isms are prisms: a reply to Keestra and Cowley

This is a reply to Keestra and Cowley (2009), which is a long critical article about our book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience ( Bennett and Hacker, 2003). In it they castigate us as ‘strict foundationalists’ (p. 532), ‘semantic purists’ (p. 548), and ‘cognitivists’ (p. 548) and accuse us of ‘semantic conservativism’, ‘radical conservativism’ (p. 533), ‘conceptual conservativism’, as well as ‘linguistic representationalism’, and ‘narrow representationalism’. These are, no doubt, very wicked things. But to think in ‘isms’ is to read what one reads through prisms – and the resulting distortions are spectacular. We shall show, with a select range of examples, just how little Keestra and Cowley (K&C) understood of what we said and just how extensively they misascribe to us views we do not hold and which we explicitly denied in the book they tried so unsuccessfully to understand.