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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: MUST Philosopy be a Waste of Time?
Message-ID: <1992Feb6.063913.8538@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 92 11:39:11 GMT
References: <1992Feb05.011716.8427@norton.com> <1992Feb06.002746.16389@convex.com> <1992Feb6.031729.14889@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <1992Feb6.031729.14889@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

>In article <1992Feb06.002746.16389@convex.com> 
>cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:

PC:
>>1) Can a philosophical question ever be decided by empirical means? 
>>
>>The answer to 1 seems--to me, at any rate--to be clearly "no".

DC:
>You've said this twice now, but it's clearly wrong.  For instance, the
>falsity of interactionist dualism is commonly held to have been
>demonstrated (or at least shown to be unlikely) by the empirical
>investigation of physicists and others, showing that there don't
						      ^^^^^^^^^^^
>seem to be significant gaps in physical causation.  Now, maybe
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>you'll insist that this just shows that the truth of interactionist
>dualism can't be a philosophical question, as it's a contingent matter,
>but here you would be disagreeing with a majority of philosophers,
>and would therefore be wrong by your own standards.

(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"?

DC:
>Furthermore, even if one held (falsely) that philosophy only
>investigates necessary, a priori, conceptual or analytic matters, the
>conclusion still doesn't follow, as matters in all these classes can
>be decided by empirical means -- e.g. the four-colour theorem was
>decided by observing the behaviour of a computer.

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. 

>-- 
>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."


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