Drawing on the distinction between natural and human kinds, I will discuss the looping effects of human kinds through the lens of contemporary cognitive (neuro)science. I will try to show that cognitive science is mainly in the business of investigating, understanding and explaining human kinds. As new conceptualisations of the human mind, agency and our nature are being created (by, for instance, neuroscience), they open up the possibility for new, different understandings of what it means to be a human being. This, I will argue, can change how people think and behave and thus change the very phenomena cognitive science investigates. Consequently, cognitive science can affect its very (future) findings. This holds especially true when society embraces new conceptualisations of the human mind and new ways of self-understanding become part and parcel of social discourse, activities, and/or structures. The quest for understanding the human mind, I will claim, is a looping journey, where what we “discover” about the human mind is inherently dependent on how we, as human beings, understand ourselves; and how we understand ourselves is, to a certain degree, dependent on how science understands us and on how we interpret what it has to say about our nature. At the end of the article, this will lead me to consider cognitive science as an intrinsically ethical endeavour.

Key words: agency, cognitive neuroscience, human kinds, objectivity, self-referentiality, sociality

In the following article we first present the growing trend of incorporating neuroscience into the law, and the growing acceptance of and trust in neuroscience’s mechanistic and reductionistic explanations of the human mind. We then present and discuss some studies that show how nudging peoples’ beliefs about matters related to human agency (such as free will, decision-making, or self-control) towards a more deterministic, mechanistic and/or reductionistic conception, exerts an influence on their very actions, mentality, and brain processes. We suggest that the neuroscientific view of the human mind exerts an influence on the very cognitive phenomena neuroscience falsely believes to be studying objectively. This holds especially when we consider the systematic integration of neuroscience into the public domain, such as the law. For, such an integration acts as a reinforcement of the public’s and legal decision-makers’ endorsement of and trust in neuroscience’s view of human nature that further changes how people think and act. Such looping effects of neurolaw are probably inevitable. Accordingly, we should be aware of the scope of neuroscientific explanations and be careful not to overstate neuroscientific evidence and findings in legal contexts.

Key words: agency, belief, looping effects, natural and human kinds, moral responsibility, neurolaw, self-control