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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: MUST Philosopy be a Waste of Time?
Message-ID: <1992Feb4.070739.21211@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Feb03.053748.28400@convex.com> <1992Feb04.011418.5433@norton.com> <1992Feb04.060419.21963@convex.com>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 92 07:07:39 GMT
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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
>discipline.

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 do not think you will find that the majority of philosophers
>alive today will say that theirs is an empirical discipline, in the sense
>that philosophical problems can be decided by empirical means. 

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.

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?).
Whether or not such arguments are empirical (strictly speaking they're
not), to argue that philosophy is divorced from the empirical gives a
misleading picture about such discussions, which are typically
tied very closely to e.g. empirical science, but are nevertheless
philosophical.  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?

-- 
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."


