Late 19th/early 20th century reflex theory shows how a scientist can knowingly adopt an idealization (the 'simple reflex') as a useful fiction, only to overextend it into a totalizing explanatory framework that outran the evidence it could actually explain.
Using reflex theory as a case study, Chirimuuta shows physiologist Charles Sherrington admitted the 'simple reflex' was an idealization that likely doesn't exist in nature, yet the field ran with it far past its explanatory limits before computational theory replaced it. ✦ AI generated
Mazviita Chirimuuta · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-01-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 10:52
a very prestigious and sort of well-regarded physiologist like Charles Sherrington was heavily invested in the reflex theory. But he admitted in his book the integrated action of the nervous system that this notion of a simplex simple reflex is an idealization. It probably doesn't exist in real life. And yet this is the key that's going to kind of unlock neurophysiology.
verbatim transcript · starts at 10:52
10:52motor loops. So a very prestigious and sort of well- reggarded um physiologist like Charles Sherington was heavily invested in the reflex theory. But he admitted in his um in his book the integrated action of the nervous system that this notion of a simplex simple reflex is an idealization. It probably doesn't exist in real life. And yet this is the key that's going to kind of unlock neurohysiology. it's going to
11:21help us decompose and make sense of all of these different interactions that could be observed experimentally. So what seemed to be going on there is that scientists were sort of taking that age-old meth um method which is that it's a good huristic to seek parsimonious um explanations to use Okam's razor and the obvious thing to do was like let's assume there's this thing that's there's a simple reflex and then
11:49running with it way too far actually never being able to um explain the amount of data that they had initially thought that they would with And it's not clear how long the reflex theory could have gone on for if it hadn't been for the computational theory sort of coming in during the um second world war era and basically providing an alternative um explanatory framework which was also quite neat and um and and
12:19I would say provides its own kind of idealization toolbox. So a very popular thing in cognitive science is to say well if something behaves you know the same way as a cognizing human for example then we can maybe we might draw inferences that it has consciousness and it has many other cognitive faculties but there there's always this kind of you know almost ignorance of the actual mechanism of of the object of study. I
12:46think behaviorism is it has a bad name but it's not that discontinu discontinuous with a lot of thinking which is sort of normal and still acceptable in science which is to treat things as black boxes. This is precisely what the behaviorist said. It's like the mind is opaque. It's hidden within the walls of someone else's individual subjectivity. As scientists all we know are the inputs and the outputs and we'll