It was not my intention to emphasize the fact that these explanations mention the brain, but rather their lack of explaining power for the premise to be described/proved. It doesn't matter whether the statement that explains nothing is "neurological differences in brain structure are the underlying causes of schizophrenia" or "it is just common sense that the sky is blue". Neither statement appeals to me because the writer is not using these perfectly good words to explain anything. If I read an explanation, I want it to explain something. If you want to use 7 syllable words, fine. If you want to use only words an average five-year-old knows, that is also fine. If you want every phrase to be achingly brilliant poetry, I have no problem with that. But if the words convey nothing, I will not be amused.
What the article above does is convey information about the strategy of using certain words to not convey information (and also to convey information that doesn't necessarily support the main argument, but sounds like it does). I find it useful in the sense that it helps to realize that certain ways of not conveying information can exploit common blind spots in myself and others. I hope this realization helps me to notice these things more often in other's writing, so that I can decrease the credibility I give such statements. And I hope it will help me to notice it more often in my writing, so I can remove such statements.
If there is a valid explanation involving the brain, the brain is more likely to be cited than if there isn't a valid explanation involving the brain.
So the absence of the word "brain" in a given explanation weakly implies that the true explanation does not feature the brain! This implication is regardless of whether or not it is true.
So I think the only sentence of yours I disagree with is:
And I hope it will help me to notice it more often in my writing, so I can remove such statements.
I claim we're doomed, and can only choose from among bia...
Weisberg et al. (2008) presented subjects with two explanations for psychological phenomena (e.g. attentional blink). Some subjects got the regular explanation, and other subjects got the 'with neuroscience' explanation that included purposely irrelevant verbiage saying that "brain scans indicate" some part of the brain already known to be involved in that psychological process caused the process to occur.
And yet, Yale cognitive science students rated the 'with neuroscience' explanations as more satisfying than the regular explanations.
Why? The purposely irrelevant neuroscience verbiage could only be important to the explanation if somebody thought that perhaps it's not the brain that was producing certain psychological phenomena. But these are Yale cognitive science students. Somehow I suspect people who chose to study cognition as information processing are less likely than average to believe the mind runs on magic. But then, why would they be additionally persuaded by information suggesting only that the brain causes psychological phenomena?
In another study, McCabe & Castel (2008) showed subjects fictional articles summarizing scientific results and including either no image, a brain scan image, or a bar graph. Subjects were asked to rate the soundness of scientific reasoning in the article, and they gave the highest ratings when the article included a brain scan image. But why should this be?
I remember talking to a friend about free will. She was a long-time physicalist who liked reading about physics and neuroscience for fun, but she didn't read Less Wrong and she thought she had contra-causal (libertarian) free will.
"Okay," I said. "So the brain is made of atoms, and atoms move according to deterministic physical law, right?"
"Right," she said.
"Okay. Now, think about the physical state of the entire universe one moment before you decided to say "Right" instead of something else, or instead of just nodding your head. If all those atoms, including the atoms in your brain, have to move to their next spot according to physical law, then could you have said anything else than what you did say in the next moment?" (Neither of us understood many-worlds yet, so you can assume we're talking about a single Everett branch.)
She paused. "Huh. I'll have to think about that."
"Also, have you heard about those studies where brain scans told researchers what the subjects were going to do before the subjects consciously decided what they were going to do?"
"No! Are you serious?"
"Yup. Sometimes they could predict the subject's choice 10 seconds before the subject consciously 'made' the choice."
"10 seconds? Wow. I didn't know that."
I think that maybe the 'with neuroscience' explanations and brain scan images are more satisfying partly because they remind us we're physicalists. They remind us that reductionism marches on, that psychology is produced by physical neurons we can take pictures of.
Just like most people, physicalists walk around all day with the subjective experience of a 'unity of consciousness' and contra-causal free will and so on. If a physicalist isn't a researcher who studies all the latest successful reductions in neuroscience or biology or physics all week long, and doesn't read Less Wrong every day, then it's possible to get lost in the feel of everyday experience and thus be surprised by a headline like 'Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them.'
Sometimes even physicalists need to be reminded — with concrete reductionistic details — that they are physicalists. Otherwise their normal human anti-reductionistic intuitions may creep back in of their own accord. That's one reason it helps to study many sciences, so you have many successful reductions in your head, and see (at some resolution) the entire picture, from psychology to atoms. As Eliezer wrote:
To her credit, my friend no longer believes in contra-causal free will.