From: hal@finney.org
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 16:26:57 MST
Robin Hanson, <rhanson@gmu.edu>, writes:
> To be more precise, such a science might predict your beliefs at any stage
> of a cognitive process; I see no reason to focus on some mythical "end."
If I'm understanding this argument, it seems a little too powerful.
It is not only arguing that ethics can be understood by empirical means,
it is saying that ethics is a branch of cognitive science, because
by cognitive analysis we can predict everything a person will come to
believe about ethics, and that is, from his perspective, all that he
can ever know about ethics.
If this is the argument, it seems to apply to all sciences. Physics is a
branch of cognitive science because we can in principle predict everything
someone will ever know about physics.
A couple of problems I can see with this are, first, that there is a
philosophical difference between physics as a science and the part of
physics I will learn. It may be that I am doomed never to understand
very much of physics, but that doesn't mean that the subject shares the
same limitations.
Second, for cognitive science to make such predictions it must have
access to all the empirical knowledge I will ever acquire. Without a
complete model of the universe, neither cognitive science nor any other
branch of science can make this kind of prediction.
Maybe I have missed the point of Robin's argument though?
Hal
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