This philosopher says historians have been going about their job all wrong
… The wrongness of the theory of mind is so profound it makes false all the stories we know and love, in narrative history (and in historical novels). Like Ptolemaic theory in physics, the theory of mind is not even on the right track, not even approximately correct. Neuroscience reveals that the brain is not organized even remotely to work the way the theory of mind says it does. The fact that narrative histories give persistently different answers to questions historians have been asking for centuries should be evidence that storytelling is not where the real answers can be found.
Eric Kandel, John O’Keefe, and May-Britt and Edvard Moser won Nobel Prizes in 2000 and 2014 for figuring out exactly how the brain encodes, stores and deploys environmental inputs to drive complex behavior. Kandel showed that the molecular biology of information storage is the same across all nervous systems. Experimenting on rats, O’Keefe and the Mosers revealed how it’s stored.
Crucially, they discovered that while different parts of the brain control different things, the neurons’ electrical signals don’t differ in “content”; they are not about different subjects. They are not about anything at all. Each neuron is just in a different part of the mid-brain, doing its job in exactly the same way all other neurons do, sending the same electrochemical oscillations. Which neurons specifically these oscillations come from and which they go to delivers the rat’s choices. We know how the brain does its job, and there is no room in this “story” for the content of neural circuitry. Neurons, singly or in vast groups, aren’t about anything. So the brain can’t “contain” beliefs at all.
The upshot for the theory of mind is devastating. There is nothing in our brains to vindicate the theory’s description of how anyone ever makes up his or her mind. And that explains a lot about how bad the theory of mind is at predicting anything much about the future, or explaining anything much about the past.If we really want to know how minds are made up, we are going to need neuroscience.
If we really want historical knowledge we’ll need to use the same tools scientists use — models and theories we can quantify and test. Guessing what was going through Hitler’s mind, and weaving it into a story is no substitute for empirical science. But we are so much in love with storytelling that we don’t think we need scientific theories at all. We’ll continue to apply our Pleistocene theory of mind. We’ll go on using it to tell the stories we crave because it was long ago bred in our bones. And we’ll continue to make mistakes in the present when we use theory of mind to understand what happened in the past.