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Article 3563 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: MUST Philosopy be a Waste of Time?
Message-ID: <1992Feb7.012501.6676@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 7 Feb 92 01:25:01 GMT
References: <1992Feb06.002746.16389@convex.com> <1992Feb6.031729.14889@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb6.063913.8538@husc3.harvard.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
Lines: 30

In article <1992Feb6.063913.8538@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

>(1) How much of this investigation has been conducted on live organisms?
>how many of them were human?  Just how would you test the Cartesian
>hypothesis of human autonomy by means of "the empirical investigation of
>physicists and others"?

I'm not interested in making a sustained critique of interactionist dualism
right now -- the purpose of bringing it up was simply to show that
empirical facts can play an evidential role with respect to philosophical
questions.  The answer to the first two questions is "some".  I have no
idea about the third question, as it seems to me that human autonomy may
hold irrespective of whether interactionist dualism is true (though of
course this depends on what kind of "autonomy" we're talking about).

>How is this sort of observation different in principle from observing the
>behavior of the abaci? is the truth of `7 + 5 = 12' decidable by empirical
>means?  Furthermore, what about observing the behavior of marks on paper or
>blackboard surfaces?  Schr\"oder's "axiom of symbolic stability" (cf.
>Frege's critique thereof in "The Foundations of Arithmetic"), asserting
>that the marks are going to stay put, clearly seems to be empirically
>motivated. 

Not very different at all.  These fall into much the same class, though
the role of the environment here is more trivial.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


