Ahab wrote:
After centuries of theorizing, philosophy has told us virtually zilch about how the mind operates. In fact, much of what it claimed to tell us is now being shown wrong through neuroscientific studies. And as neuroscience advances, the study of mind is going to incrasingly become a scientific matter, just like evolution and gravity are now.
Beg to differ. Philosophy has told us how to distinguish between questions of formal validity and the truths of the premises, and has the familiar list of fallacies was invented by philosophers long before the Scientific Revolution.
5 comments:
You're both right--but connecting the two is the challenge. Philosophy doesn't tell us "how" we think--that is, what operations are going on inside our brain. Neuroscience doesn't have a thing to offer about how we can actually trust these (shall I say) brain secretions to have any objective validity. You have to go to philosophy for that, or else give up on it completely.
For these to work together, there has to be a connection between physical and non-physical reality. One of the great arguments for theism is that it can provde an explanation for that link. That's too long a discussion to go into here, there are arguments pro and con, and you probably already know the arguments. The theistic explanation is not entirely free of muddlement, but other explanations, it appears to me, fail entirely.
I would ask any philosopher: tell me the most important contribution to our understanding of human thinking that philosophy has made in the last 50 years. What are the main results that people tend to agree on as to their explanatory power for helping us understand human thought?
Epistemology is slowly becoming a branch of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Hume's laws of association and the like are now subjects of empirical study.
Normative arguments about how we 'should' think are indeed a different thing altogether. While philosophy still has some quibbles to work out there, formalizing good thinking has largely become a branch of mathematics. Most of the work is far outside the understanding of the philosopher trapped in the limiting constraints of natural language and first-order logic.
The rather new science of Neuroeconomics is getting at some very interesting questions about decision making in the face of uncertainty.
Philosophy is always growing in new directions, but at the same time parts of it atrophy and fall off when its children, the specific sciences, take on a life of their own and maul their parent. Much epistemology is no better than a withered vestigial organ.
But to make this kind of argument you have to conflate the normative and the descriptive. You have to get normative results from a descriptive analysis. And this involves an entailment failure.
As for committing the epistemic version of the so-called naturalistic fallacy, I quite explicitly avoided that carton of gnats by admitting that questions of how we should think still have some philosophical traction (though I should have put it in terms of how we should publicly justify our claims, which is not the same thing as thinking).
I'd like to draw attention to the first paragraph of my previous post. That is what I am most interested in: please tell me what is the major contribution philosophy has made to our understanding of the human mind in the past 50 years.
Since nobody here seems to have an answer, I'll give one. In my opinion, Twin Earth (Putnam) showed that intentional contents cannot be fixed by features of an individual human brain. This was one of the most important advances in philosophy of language/mind in the 20th century. I'd be curious to hear others.
HV: I am not endorsing anything but the broad conclusions of the twinearth example: the content of some intentional states is not fixed by events going on in the boundaries of the skull. (A natural consequence of Dretske's information-theoretic view of content, incidentally: I should confess I am biased, though, as I have a in which I am slowly summarizing his brilliant Knowledge and the Flow of Information).
Spelling out the implications for the various -isms in philosophy would be a pain beause each -ism (functionalism, reductionism) is an ill-defined polyheaded monster that can't be pinned down (and hence killed) easily.
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