From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!convex!cash Wed Feb  5 11:56:53 EST 1992
Article 3467 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: cash@convex.com (Peter Cash)
Subject: Re: MUST Philosopy be a Waste of Time?
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Date: Tue, 04 Feb 1992 17:22:50 GMT
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In article <1992Feb4.070739.21211@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In article <1992Feb04.060419.21963@convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:

>>This may surprise you, but some matters of fact _are_ decided by a vote.
>>For example, the practitioners of a discipline decide what constitutes that

>Well, I prefer the view that disciplines are something more like natural
>kinds, with terms like "philosophy" designatingly rigidly rather than
>via description.  e.g. I hate to think about the results of a vote about
>what constitutes "psychology" in the 1940's, say.  I'd say it's very
>likely that voters would simply have been *wrong*.

I would say that they _can't_ be wrong about this; I would say that
psychology has changed considerably since the forties. Why shouldn't it
have? Certainly philosophy has changed since the time of
Aristotle--Aristotle would disagree emphatically with my assertions about
the non-empirical nature of philosophy. That's because in his day,
scientific questions were not as sharply defined as they are today, and
were considered a proper part of philosophy. That doesn't make Aristotle or
me wrong; things change.

>All kinds of philosophical problems can be decided by empirical means.
>e.g. the longstanding debate from the 1950s and 1960s about whether
>it is analytic or synthetic that there can't be reddish green was
>decided empirically in the 1980s by psychological experiments showing
>that there *can* be reddish green.  Now, one might say that this means
>that if the philosophers had been smart, they would have worked out
>for themselves, non-empirically, that it was synthetic, but nevertheless
>the issue was settled empirically.

I stand by what I said: if the question is, in theory, amenable to an
empirical resolution then it is not a philosophical question. In any case,
I don't understand the question, "Can there be a reddish green?", so I'm
not prepared to say what kind of question this is. Are you asking if there
are conditions under which I might see a color that I would describe as
reddish-green? If so, this sounds like a question having to do with
psychology of perception. (I'd be interested in hearing more about this
reddish-green business, by the way.) 

>Further, philosophy deals with all kinds of questions of the form
>"is empirical claim P true, given empirical facts W?" (e.g. given
>that the brain is constituted such-and-so, do people have beliefs?).

I don't follow you. Are you talking about rules of inference? What has
brain-structure to do with beliefs? (Well, now _there's_ a philosophical
question!)

...
>  Many philosophers seem quite happy to even debate
>the truth of such Ps before all the facts W are in -- e.g. the various
>philosophers who have a strong commitment to the existence of a
>"language of thought", which is certainly an empirical claim.  When
>they so argue, are they no longer philosophers?

I would say they're confused philosophers...
-- 
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             |      Die Welt ist alles, was Zerfall ist.     |
Peter Cash   |       (apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein)      |cash@convex.com
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