From: Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 00:39:50 MST
Dan Fabulich <daniel.fabulich@yale.edu> wrote:
>Logical positivism ("if it's not
>analytically derivable or empirically verifiable then it's meaningless!")
>is wrong even by its own lights ("so logical positivism, being underivable
>and unverifiable, is ALSO meaningless?"), and sociobiological ethics can't
>justify itself any better than competing theories;
That attack on logical positivism has always bothered me.
I usually see this attack directed at some form of matieralism ("Matieralism
can't explain emotions.") The answer for that is "Yes it can, emotions are
patterns of neuron firings in the brain." (c.f. Dennett, Hofstadter).
Could a similar defense work for logical positivism? Given empirical
knowledge of how human (or any other kind of) mind(s) work, don't
philosophical systems and ideas become just as matieralistic and examinable
as computer programs?
The biggest problem with epistimelogy seems to be a lot of the philosophers
seem to be trapped in vitalism mode, continuing to assume that cognition and
perception are not mechanistic, inherently comprehensible physical
processes. Some of the weirdness I've seen in epistimology makes a lot more
sense if it is understood as attempts by philosophers to avoid an infinite
regress ("We think we think we think we think ... like this.")
Aside: "source-code", or "domdule" level understanding of the structure of
the human mind could tell us, once and for all, in real physical terms,
exactly what humans mean by "mean" (assuming most humans use isomorphic
mental machinery for these sorts of cognitive operations, which seems
reasonable). Epistimelogy would become empirically descriptive, and we'ed
have some sort of physical base on which to build a philosophy .
This is the sort of stuff I was hoping to see when I started studying
psychology. Boy was I in for a disappointment :)
Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca
P.S. I think Eliezer said it best when he observed that when one attempts to
bottom out human formal systems like physics or math or philosophy, one
finds human semantic primitives, not universal ontological primitives.
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