Philosophy and Science: Philosophy Forums

Philosophy Forums » Guest Speakers » John Searle » Philosophy and Science » Philosophy and Science

Philosophy and Science
Can Philosophy be replaced with Science?

Page: 1 2 3

Philosophy and Science

HamishMacSporran
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 03, 2005

Total Topics: 15
Total Posts: 855

Posted 10/09/09 - 07:37 AM: Subject: Philosophy and Science	#1
Professor Searle, I gather you are a member of the Cognitive Science group at Berkeley. As a philosopher within that group, I would like to ask your opinion about the relation between philosophy and science. The maturation of natural philosophy into science has seen an unprecedented growth in our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Fundamental to this development has been the rejection of typical rationalist philosophical methods in favour of empirical scientific alternatives. In particular, the recognition that deductive methods only recycle what is already present in the starting assumptions and that our innate biases and 'common sense' prejudices are generally misleading when applied to problems beyond the mundane leads to a realisation that, without empirical constraints, philosophers will tend to spin cobwebs of fantasy rather than produce practical solutions to genuine problems. This recognition, that philosophy is failing to make meaningful headway and needs to be rebuilt on empirical foundations, has been articulated by a number of significant thinkers. Francis Bacon argued for experiment and inductive logic to replace Aristotelian deductive methods. David Hume argued that metaphysics needed an empirical basis. W. V. O. Quine argued for a naturalisation of philosophical problems. Furthermore, many scientists, given the success of the scientific method, regard the persistence of academic philosophy in the same light as they regard the publication of horoscopes in newspapers. How would you characterise the contributions that philosophy can make? And specifically, if 'cognitive science' genuinely is a science where do philosophical methods fit into its operations?

John Searle
Honored Guest

Usergroup: Guest Speakers
Joined: Oct 13, 2009

Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 8

1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 10/23/09 - 03:31 PM:	#2
There is no sharp dividing line between philosophy and science, nonetheless there are certain characteristic features of philosophical problems which distinguish them from most scientific problems. Philosophical problems tend to be very general, and they tend to concern matters that are in some broad sense conceptual or logical. So the question, What is the cause of cancer?, is a scientific and not a philosophical question. The question, What is the nature of causation?, is a philosophical question. Sometimes, but unfortunately very rarely, philosophical questions can receive scientific answers. I think we now have a scientific answer to the philosophical question, What is the nature of life? And I think we will get a neurobiological scientific to the question, What is the relation between consciousness and the brain? There is a trivial reason why science is always “right” and philosophy is always “wrong”. As soon as we think we understand something completely, we stop calling it “philosophy” and start calling it “science”. So the issue between vitalism and mechanism was an issue that divided both philosophers and scientists with scientists on both sides of the issue and philosophers on both sides of the issue. The issue has now been resolved in the favor of mechanism, but in part because we have a much more sophisticated and complex conception of mechanism than existed in the days when this dispute was being passionately conducted. The DNA version of “mechanism” is now established and “vitalism” is now just a false philosophical theory. The result is that mechanism is no longer regarded as a philosophical theory, but as an established scientific fact. This is a good example of once we think we know something, we stop calling it “philosophy” and start calling it “science”. Any branch of science is in need of careful philosophical monitoring. This is less true with established disciplines where all of the assumptions are reasonably clear, as in geology. But it is currently very much true in the social sciences, that there is a need of examination of philosophical underpinnings. I have done some of this work in a book called The Construction of Social Reality, and I am now producing another book called Making the Social World. In the case of Cognitive Science, the original paradigm was based on a philosophical mistake. The idea was that the mind is a digital computer program. As they used to say, “The mind is to the brain as the program is to the computer hardware”. That mistake is easy to refute, and I have done it. No one can say in advance what the interaction between philosophy and science is going to be like. Cognitive Science is an interesting example because what was masquerading as an established scientific thesis, the idea that the mind is a computer program, is a philosophical category mistake. It was fairly easy to show this, and I did so in a number of places.

HamishMacSporran
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 03, 2005

Total Topics: 15
Total Posts: 855

Posted 10/24/09 - 01:10 PM:	#3
Thank you very much for taking the time to consider my question and express your thoughts. To some extent your answer suggests that philosophy prepares the ground for science, that philosophers iron out the conceptual confusions and construct a framework in which to consider a problem and then scientists get on with investigating it systematically. You say something similar in your essay "the future of philosophy". However, many scientists take the view that the scientific revolution was made possible not by an accumulation of philosophical analysis, but instead by a rejection of the existing philosophical systems in favour of a new experimental method. From this point of view, scientists don't need philsophers to do their groundwork for them, but should instead ignore their clever arguments and focus on doing experiments. Hence the motto of the Royal Society, "Take nobody's word for it". You cite the example of vitalism. This hypothesis was falsified by a number of experimental scientific tests, notably Wohler's synthesis of urea from inorganic chemicals, rather than a philosophical breakthrough which showed that the concept was incoherent or contradictory. Wohler described his result as "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact", which seems to me an apt way to describe the importance of experiment within science. Experiment provides the best method for freeing ourselves from the enchantment of beautiful hypotheses. My question, in this case, comes down to whether the scientists would have been better off just getting on with the experiments, without worrying about the philosophical arguments, and if not what is it that philosophical discourse provides that experimental method cannot. You also raise the issue of computationalism within cognitive science, and your arguments against it. Whatever their merits, these arguments have not led to a conclusive rejection of computationalism. Dennett, for example, continues to deny your conclusions are valid, and the mind as a computer program metaphor continues to be common currency among cognitive scientists. To many scientists this is just another symptom of philosophy's malaise: nothing ever gets resolved. That's why, instead of arguing for another thousand years about whether universals exist, they believe they need to focus on questions that can be definitively answered by experiment, with some even claiming that questions outside this domain are meaningless. Does the computationalist hypothesis really have any experimental implications for cognitive scientists? What effects would you expect your arguments to have on a cognitive scientists research program? Are there benefits of philosophical dispute even in the case that no definite conclusion is reached?

MarchHare
Graduate

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jun 23, 2009

Total Topics: 4
Total Posts: 190

Posted 10/24/09 - 11:48 PM:	#4
HasmishMacSporran, I suspect if you asked Francis Bacon whether his Baconian method was a result of rejecting philosophical systems or accumulating philosophical analyses, he would reply "Absolutely no" to the disjunction and "Absolutely yes" that those were two aspects of what he did. Equally, it's impossible that Western science could have flourished without Scholastic philosophers like a certain William said to have possessed a certain razor. René Descartes would also have considered a complete separation of his philosophy and his contributions to the scientific method utterly bizzare. HamishMacSporran wrote: My question, in this case, comes down to whether the scientists would have been better off just getting on with the experiments, without worrying about the philosophical arguments, and if not what is it that philosophical discourse provides that experimental method cannot. I think it's crude to suggest that the experimental method has been stagnant over the centuries and that it is somehow the only component in science. For example, hypothesis development is also an important part of science; in cases where you have things like null hypotheses it can be absolutely vital to get the logic and conceptual framework right. Is the question "Should evolutionary psychologists adopt empirical adaptationism, explanatory adaptationism, methodological adaptationism or some combination of the three?" a philosophical or a scientific question? If it's the latter, it's not an experimental question per se. Meanwhile, dicussion of paradigms in the sciences (like evolutionary psychology) which operate as hypothesis-generating devices will feature just as many philosophical considerations as scientific considerations. After all, if scientists had just got on with experiments uncritically, we might still be doing science in an Aristotelian manner, the thought of which chills my bones... "HamishMacSporran" wrote: To many scientists this is just another symptom of philosophy's malaise: nothing ever gets resolved. That's why, instead of arguing for another thousand years about whether universals exist, they believe they need to focus on questions that can be definitively answered by experiment, Is anyone saying we should argue about the existence of universals, at least while wearing our scientist-hats? Also, I don't like the idea of "definitively answered questions". Show me a definitively answered question and I'll show you a tautology. Every datum discovered by science is potentially subject to revision; put in philosophical terms, fallibilism is an inherent part of the empirical aspect of science. "HamishMacSporran" wrote: with some even claiming that questions outside this domain are meaningless. If anyone thinks this, then I would suggest they do a little bit of philosophy (the philosophy of semantics in particular) or at the very least look at what scientists actually do, rather than what philosophers think we do. To restrict "meaningfulness" to issues of experiment would be a hilariously unworkable use of the word.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

rigelrover
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Aug 05, 2009

Total Topics: 19
Total Posts: 559

Posted 10/26/09 - 06:13 AM:	#5
I think that professor Searle already made the point pretty well. When a question becomes testable, there is no more need for philosophic inquiry in relation to the particular matter referenced by the question - just do the experiments; test the hypothesis. Where there are matters that are open-ended to science, one must consider them philosophically. The scientist and the philosopher, both, should rely on empiricism and experience as well as logic. Philosophic inquiry discovers which answers are discrete possibilities. This is sometimes the basis for scientific inquiry, and it is sometimes not. I think that there is a misconception, though, about the nature of philosophy vs the nature of science (and the nature of mathematics for that matter); that they arise separately, and should be properly differentiated because of this. They do not. They are all derivatives of the fundamental curiosity inherent in conscious being. The question arises naturally. How we go about answering it is a matter of picking a methodology. When it becomes a matter relating adequately to well-accepted empirical principles we trust that testing will provide an adequate answer, but the question was not either a philosophical one or a scientific one, it was simply an honest one. These fields are separated as methodologies within the same realm of discourse (i.e. about the same questions); they are reflexively related to each other and inseparable, in essence. But I am sure that there will be, at least, subtle disagreement about that point. Inasmuch as there are still honest questions that cannot be answered via scientific methodologies, there is room for philosophy. If there are truly no paradoxes inherent in what exists, then the role of philosophy is to help develop proper ways of communicating reality to ourselves and others that absolves itself of the apparent contradictions. If a proposition seems to be contradictory, it is only because the philosopher has not finished her work. If a scientist is not willing to acknowledge that the apparent paradoxes must be resolved via philosophic thought (i.e. relativity vs quantum mechanics, etc., etc.) than he is behaving naively. Edited by rigelrover on 10/26/09 - 06:51 AM
I am more interested in questions than answers; dialog than dictation. If we can reasonably believe that there is not just a breach, but a fundamentally unclosable gap between the individual mind and the ultimate nature of the reality; the primordial thing in itself, then 'true' mystery does exist.

HamishMacSporran
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 03, 2005

Total Topics: 15
Total Posts: 855

Posted 10/26/09 - 10:12 AM:	#6
MarchHare wrote: To restrict "meaningfulness" to issues of experiment would be a hilariously unworkable use of the word. In fact, I find this kind of positivism frequently expressed by scientists. The insult "not even wrong" is commonly directed at ideas thought to be unfalsifiable. The implication is that by being untestable in experiment, these ideas are neither true nor false, and therefore meaningless. Common targets are new age mysticism, sociology, etc. MarchHare wrote: For example, hypothesis development is also an important part of science; ... Meanwhile, dicussion of paradigms in the sciences (like evolutionary psychology) which operate as hypothesis-generating devices will feature just as many philosophical considerations as scientific considerations. How does philosophy contribute to hypothesis generation? Are you suggesting that scientists look for hypotheses in philosophy journals? Or are they generating the hypotheses themselves, but in a way that depends on philosophical discourse? Most importantly, does science require that we make a careful conceptual analysis, in the manner of philosophy, of a subject matter before beginning experimentation? Or is there a danger that the enchantment of beautiful hypotheses will lock us into an overly restrictive research paradigm?

MarchHare
Graduate

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jun 23, 2009

Total Topics: 4
Total Posts: 190

Posted 10/26/09 - 11:55 PM:	#7
HamishMacSporran wrote: In fact, I find this kind of positivism frequently expressed by scientists. The insult "not even wrong" is commonly directed at ideas thought to be unfalsifiable. The implication is that by being untestable in experiment, these ideas are neither true nor false, and therefore meaningless. Common targets are new age mysticism, sociology, etc. "Frequently" is of course a very weak claim; I can just as readily say "I frequently find scientists not taking up a positivist theory of meaning and I never find anyone sincerely believe it, because to seriously think that only sentences had to be true or false (which is a different claim from being unfalsifiable, by the way; I don't think anyone has ever seriously suggested that something has to be falsifiable to be meaningful) is an utterly untenable theory of language. Consider this: the only category of sentences that have a truth value are propositions. Yet interrogatives, optatives and imperatives are all essential parts of our everyday discourse and they function just fine, most of the time. There are a huge numbers of sentences that are meaningful, in the ordinary sense of the word, but have no truth value. Now, you might say "But the ideas that these sentences refer to are only meaningful if they are true or false." Yet, if the meaning of sentences and words consists in their reference to anything (ideas or otherwise) then this falls foul of one of Frege's classic ideas: the same object can have two different senses, eg. I may think "Superman" when I hear the name "Clark Kent" and Lois Lane may think "My colleague", so we're both referring to the same object, yet we clearly don't mean the same thing. You might try to get out of this trap by saying that "The ideas that these sentences mean are only meaningful if they are true or false." But sentences don't mean ideas; ideas are private, whereas language (in the ordinary sense) is public. If you, on the other hand, conceive as language as a tool that we use in our social interaction, then it is readily apparent that sentences that do not have truth values nevertheless have meaning. Hence I might ask a flatmate "Where is the sugar?" and my flatmate knows what I mean. "HamishMacSporran" wrote: How does philosophy contribute to hypothesis generation? Are you suggesting that scientists look for hypotheses in philosophy journals? No. "HamishMacSporran" wrote: Or are they generating the hypotheses themselves, but in a way that depends on philosophical discourse? Sometimes. If you've ever actually conducted scientific research, you'll know that hypothesis generation is a fairly anarchic process. It's one process in science where divergence from the norm is very useful; the convergence on a publicly uniform method is only really necessary when it comes to experimentation, though of course there are various criteria that hypotheses have to conform to in order to be scientific. However, philosophy tends to rear its head earlier in the process, in the methodology of hypothesis generation itself. Take a methodological question dealt with Cosmides and Tooby: "how does explanatory evolutionary psychology (a hypothesis generating scientific paradigm) escape the problem of theoretical irrelevance?" Is this a scientific question? If it is, it must be a very puzzling type of scientific question, since its meaning is dependant on normative concepts (rationality, usefulness) that aren't subjects of scientific inquiry, which is of course a descriptive discipline. One does not engage in experimentation to answer such a question, yet answering the question is a task of scientific import, which is why Cosmides and Tooby wanted to answer the question before carrying out their scientific research. "HamishMacSporran" wrote: Most importantly, does science require that we make a careful conceptual analysis, in the manner of philosophy, of a subject matter before beginning experimentation? I don't think you can separate conceptual analysis and experimentation in the sciences so cleanly. We don't come to science like an explorer comes to some uninvestigated quarter of Siberia; every scientific inquiry is a construction on the foundations of centuries of human progress in understanding the world. There is no single linear process in any line of inquiry, but a web of multiple inquiries conflicting and acting upon each other and inquiries that are of use to science need not be themselves of the sciences. Imagine, if you can, that David Hume was never born. Imagine, further, that no-one had ever suggested that contiguity was a criterion for causality and imagine that people decided that correlation was sufficient for causality. The problems of such an approach suggest themselves; after all, we've all been taught that to equate correlation and causality is a cardinal sin. What kind of inquiry would resolve the horrific confusion that would result from such a misconception? "HamishMacSporran" wrote: Or is there a danger that the enchantment of beautiful hypotheses will lock us into an overly restrictive research paradigm? Only if we were to mistake forms of conceptual analysis as being epistemically equivocable with actual research and then get into problems, eg. the Epicureans more or less turned away from the science of the day entirely because they mistook their speculative metaphysics for being a source of truth. There is always a danger of getting stuck in a restrictive research paradigm (particularly one that generates a lot of awkardly testable null hypotheses) but one of the best attributes of science is its self-correcting nature. A flawed research paradigm, operating in an environment of open empirical scientific research, will not last forever. What is important in science is not so much having the right premises, but having the right methodology; put a bit poetically, it's not a question of being in the right place to find where you want to go, but being able to read the map.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

HamishMacSporran
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 03, 2005

Total Topics: 15
Total Posts: 855

Posted 10/27/09 - 07:50 AM:	#8
MarchHare wrote: Consider this: the only category of sentences that have a truth value are propositions. Yet interrogatives, optatives and imperatives are all essential parts of our everyday discourse and they function just fine, most of the time. There are a huge numbers of sentences that are meaningful, in the ordinary sense of the word, but have no truth value. Yet, if the meaning of sentences and words consists in their reference to anything (ideas or otherwise) then this falls foul of one of Frege's classic ideas: the same object can have two different senses, eg. I may think "Superman" when I hear the name "Clark Kent" and Lois Lane may think "My colleague", so we're both referring to the same object, yet we clearly don't mean the same thing. You might try to get out of this trap by saying that "The ideas that these sentences mean are only meaningful if they are true or false." But sentences don't mean ideas; ideas are private, whereas language (in the ordinary sense) is public. If you, on the other hand, conceive as language as a tool that we use in our social interaction, then it is readily apparent that sentences that do not have truth values nevertheless have meaning. Hence I might ask a flatmate "Where is the sugar?" and my flatmate knows what I mean. You raise some interesting issues, particularly since my own research is on semantics. I'm not arguing that a truth conditional approach to semantics is correct. And I'm certainly not arguing that the correct way to interpret truth is in terms of experiment. And I have no wish to imply that most scientists take this view. Nonetheless, it is expressed. And it used to be even more popular in the heyday of positivism. Interestingly, you appear to reject the externalist (meaning=truth conditions) approach to semantics, and also the internalist (meaning=ideas). In contrast you approve of an approach to semantics grounded in social interaction. To me this is pointing towards Wittgenstein, and the idea that meaning is use. However, Wittgenstein can be seen as leading directly to behaviourism, and the idea that a semantic theory is complete if it accounts for all observable behaviour. This is precisely what Searle's chinese room argument is directed against, and is also one of the issues on which the relationship of philosophy to science troubles me. Methodological behaviourism is the standard experimental methodology for the psychological sciences. So if one investigates semantics scientifically, it is inevitable that this comes down to modelling various behaviours. However, Searle claims that accurately modelling behaviour is not enough to capture semantics. How should that influence my research? I have noticed, particularly in semantics, that people have strong intuitions about the way that language and thought work. There are therefore strong expectations that certain features should shoe-horned into models, whatever the actual empirical data. To me, the essence of science is that you build theories step by step, only introducing elements that are required to explain specific experimental results. The alternative is to build models based on what we think the world ought to be like, which will not work. Thus, an optimal model of semantics is one which accounts for the observable behaviour and nothing more. But Searle insists it must do more. How should I react? (By the way, just in case any of this is of interest to you: The truth conditional approach is the most common in semantics. Interrogatives, etc. can be given an interpretation in this approach, e.g. David Lewis. Russel tried to get rid of Frege's sense in favour of reference only. Chomsky, linguistics' top dog, takes a view somewhat akin to meanings are ideas. At any rate, he is an internalist, in the sense that meaning is internal. I think he would also reject the claim that language is public, in the sense that his notion of language is based on internal individual competencies.)

MarchHare
Graduate

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jun 23, 2009

Total Topics: 4
Total Posts: 190

Posted 10/28/09 - 12:21 AM:	#9
HamishMacSporran wrote: I'm not arguing that a truth conditional approach to semantics is correct. And I'm certainly not arguing that the correct way to interpret truth is in terms of experiment. And I have no wish to imply that most scientists take this view. Nonetheless, it is expressed. And it used to be even more popular in the heyday of positivism. Absolutely. At the very least, as an underlying assumption, it permeates through a lot of modern philosophy (especially epistemology) to such an extent that most of the lectures in epistemology I have had have been ultimately intended towards giving necessary and eventually sufficient conditions for "knowledge" as an abstract concept. Frankly, the descriptivist view of language is one of my PERSONAL critiques of philosophy, coming from a scientific background. It is as if someone said "Only the noble gases are elements, since they only react under special circumstances." I then ask "But what about these other elements?" "They aren't really elements, but just collections of atoms of a uniform structure that form into molecules; they have no elemental content." As with the propositional fetishism, both this person and I have had enough shared experiences in our education to be able to conduct this conversation, such as it is. I have even had conversations with people who learnt English at the same school as me and who have at times expressed the view that, of all the types of sentence, only propositions are meaningful. Assuming that these people haven't come across some new fact that I don't know (and which they are reluctant to tell me) all I can conclude is that they are using "meaning" in a radically different way both from my use and the use which we were taught in school, just as seems to have happened in the above dialogue. "HMS" wrote: Interestingly, you appear to reject the externalist (meaning=truth conditions) approach to semantics, and also the internalist (meaning=ideas). In contrast you approve of an approach to semantics grounded in social interaction. To me this is pointing towards Wittgenstein, and the idea that meaning is use. However, Wittgenstein can be seen as leading directly to behaviourism, and the idea that a semantic theory is complete if it accounts for all observable behaviour. This is precisely what Searle's chinese room argument is directed against, and is also one of the issues on which the relationship of philosophy to science troubles me. The Chinese Room experiment is one of the most fascinating and profound thought experiments of the 20th century and amongst other things is a vital remind that a conversation depends on having at least two persons, the kind of simple fact that philosophers are liable to forget. However, the view that meaning is use does not necessarily lead to behaviourism (it didn't in Wittgenstein's case) though a form of basic epistemic behaviourism, in the sense of inferring our instinctive belief in the existence of other minds from the behaviour of other people, is necessary to escape solipsism. One can distinguish, in order of descending correctness, between basic epistemic behaviourism; psychological behaviourism, the view that psychologists should only deal with observable behaviour; and ontological behaviourism, the view that mental states and behaviours are actually identical. I embrace the first, sympathise with the second but reject it, and the less said about the third, the better. Behaviour comes into the Philosophical Investigations most notably in Wittgenstein's example of a new civilization which seemed to have structured logical behaviour and a structured logical language, but didn't gel the two together. He does appeal to our idea that this language wouldn't be a language in the sense that the rest of the book deals with and I think there's a lot to be said for this argument. That said, I actually find J. L. Austin the most lucid of the ordinary language philosophers: even the title of his book, "How to do things with words", suggests more that is true about language than you'd get out of most philosophers of language in a lifetime. "HMS" wrote: Methodological behaviourism is the standard experimental methodology for the psychological sciences. So if one investigates semantics scientifically, it is inevitable that this comes down to modelling various behaviours. However, Searle claims that accurately modelling behaviour is not enough to capture semantics. How should that influence my research? I was under the impression that methodological behaviourism is out of fashion in psychology and had been largely supplanted by new computational functionalist approaches, but that might just be the institution I study at. Even if one doesn't embrace the functionalist paradigm, the hardware/software distinction offers an inviting distinction between what is readily observable and what is not observable yet is nonetheless knowable. "HMS" wrote: I have noticed, particularly in semantics, that people have strong intuitions about the way that language and thought work. There are therefore strong expectations that certain features should shoe-horned into models, whatever the actual empirical data. To me, the essence of science is that you build theories step by step, only introducing elements that are required to explain specific experimental results. Why this constraint on theorisation? By building models that lay out the consequences of our intuitive thoughts about the subject, we can potentially get to experiments that actually test our models. It's important to distinguish these models, of course, from scientific explanations and I would agree that it can be disturbing when people equivocate the two. I would not expect a behavioural psychologist to give me an explanation of semantics that matches my intuitions, but I might (were it a field that interested me) try to create a model that could at least express some of my intuitions about semantics in such a format that a behavioural psychologist could further formulate them into testable hypotheses. "HMS" wrote: (By the way, just in case any of this is of interest to you: The truth conditional approach is the most common in semantics. Interrogatives, etc. can be given an interpretation in this approach, e.g. David Lewis. I don't doubt that one can interpret any sentence function in the truth conditional approach, eg. one can interpret imperatives and optatives in terms of their satisfaction conditions. Put more accurately, one can translate these sentence functions into a declarative functional form. But if I could translate every single possible sentence in French into an English sentence I wouldn't say I have reduced French to English and none of my sentences will be explanations of the activity of speaking French. "HMS" wrote: Russel tried to get rid of Frege's sense in favour of reference only. Chomsky, linguistics' top dog, takes a view somewhat akin to meanings are ideas. At any rate, he is an internalist, in the sense that meaning is internal. I think he would also reject the claim that language is public, in the sense that his notion of language is based on internal individual competencies.) I'm not entirely sure what Chomsky thinks these days. I don't know anyone who still takes the language of thought, in the funky 1960s sense, seriously anymore. Frustratingly, people in the philosophy of psychology still talk about "the language of thought" quite a bit, but they seem to be referring to something more along the lines of a higher level programming language intermediating between the machine code-like neural architecture and our content-ridden conscious uses of languages. Insofar as internalism is a weak hypothesis about how we understand public languages, it's potentially plausible, but its truth would not give us an account of the meaning of public language in terms of private concepts. If we have a language of thought, it must be a private language (though nativists are very resistant to research in neuroscience on neuroplasticity and will sometimes insist on all kinds of astonishing postulates of how the language of thought could be extremely uniform), so it doesn't get any further along the project of explaining the effectiveness of public language than old theories of meaning in terms of ideas. Perhaps it would be sound were Hegelian or Platonic idealism correct or if evolution had given us a more genetically determined brain.
Doubt requires a reason to doubt. Nothing is immune from potential doubt. The correct response to a question isn't always to try to give the question's answer.

HamishMacSporran
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 03, 2005

Total Topics: 15
Total Posts: 855

Posted 10/29/09 - 03:47 AM:	#10
rigelrover wrote: I think that there is a misconception, though, about the nature of philosophy vs the nature of science (and the nature of mathematics for that matter); that they arise separately, and should be properly differentiated because of this. They do not. They are all derivatives of the fundamental curiosity inherent in conscious being. The question arises naturally. How we go about answering it is a matter of picking a methodology. Identifying the particular methodology of science is an important issue. If we wish to claim that science produces knowledge which is reliable and objective, in a way that the processes which produced beliefs about the earth being the centre of the universe or the stars being afixed to chrystal spheres were not, then we have to identify some aspect of its methodology which demarcates it from non-science. On the other hand, if we follow Feyerabend and claim that science has no definite methodology and 'anything goes', then it is not clear that scientific knowledge can be clearly demarcated from other belief systems, e.g. Voodoo or Qabbala. Typically, the basis of the scientific method is taken to be experiment, and particularly the aspect that demarcates it from philosophy. For example, Searle claims that even if we have a theory of language which models all the observable phenomena, and can be used to simulate the behaviour of real language users, we still won't have accounted for the actual semantics; the meaning or understanding behind the words used. Thus, our empirically best theory, the one that accounts for all of the observable phenomena with the least theoretical apparatus, will not capture the actual semantics, according to Searle. I take this to mean that whatever Searle is talking about cannot be investigated experimentally, i.e. scientifically. Searle requires that a theory of semantics account for all the observable phenomena and also do something else. The something else appears to have no observable consequences, since we can simulate all the observable phenomena without reference to it. Therefore, whatever it is, it is on the other side of the science-philosophy divide.

Page: 1 2 3

Sorry, you don't have permission to post. Log in, or register if you haven't yet.