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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: MUST Philosopy be a Waste of Time?
Message-ID: <1992Feb7.050537.26358@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1992Feb06.002746.16389@convex.com> <1992Feb6.031729.14889@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Feb06.044858.27264@convex.com>
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 92 05:05:37 GMT
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In article <1992Feb06.044858.27264@convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:

>"Commonly held" by whom, I wonder?  Certainly by neither philosophers nor
>physicists.

By both: at least by the ones I know.  Put it this way: interactionist
dualism is widely held to be false; but if we had opened up our heads
and found nothing but sawdust inside, so that there were large
physically inexplicable causal gaps between stimulus and action,
then interactionist dualism would have been widely held to be true.
So the plausibility of interactionist dualism depends strongly on the
empirical facts.

>I never said that _all_ conceptual problems are philosophical in nature.
>The mathematicians would put out a contract on me.

This avoids the main point, which is that the only reason I can see for
arguing that philosophical problems can't be decided empirically is that
philosophical problems concern a priori (or conceptual, or whatever)
matters, and that a priori matters can't be decided empirically, which
is false.

e.g. the question of whether a certain proposition P is analytic or
synthetic is a conceptual problem, and many philosophical problems
are of this form, but such a problem is occasionally resolved
empirically by the observation that P is in fact false.

-- 
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."


