Cognitive psychologists generally make better predicitons about human behavior than neuroscientists.
I grant you that; my assertion was one of type, not of degree. A predictive explanation will generally (yes, I am retracting my ‘almost always’ quantifier) be reductionist, but this a very different statement than the most reductionist explanation will be the best.
Here it seems to me like you think about philosophy as distinct from empirical reality.
Less ‘distinct’ and more ‘abstracted’. The put it as pithy (and oversimplified) as possible, empiricism is about what is (probably) true, philosophy is about about what is (probably) necessarily true.
I could be more precise and accurate about my own thoughts here, but philosophy is one of those terms where if you ask ten different people you’ll get twelve different answers. The relation between philosophy and empirical reality depends on what ‘philosophy’ is.
To me your post didn’t feel inaccurate but confused.
I think confusion is inaccuracy at the meta level.
And besides that, I actually felt when writing that post that I was repeating ‘I was confused’ to the point of parody. Illusion of transparency, I suppose.
A mix of saying trival things and throwing around terms where I don’t know exactly what you mean
I’m for being ambiguous, but you’ll have be more precise about what I’m being ambiguous about. I can’t be clear about my terminology without knowing where I’m being unclear.
I’m not sure whether you have thought about what you mean exactly either.
I don’t think it’s worth debating what I meant when I don’t mean it anymore.
You can also make great predicions on believes that the function of the heart is pumping blood even if there are no “function-atoms” around.
It’s not clear what you’re saying here. If you’re talking about why the heart pumps blood instead of doing something else, that requires a historical explanation, a ‘why is it like this instead of like that’ and presumes the heart was optimized for something, and would have been optimized for something else if something had willed it.
If this is what you’re saying then yeah, the explanation will not be reductionist.
If you’re saying you can predict the broad strokes of what the heart will do without reducing all the way to the level of ‘function atoms’ then I completely agree. The space of explanations of reality at the level of atoms is large enough that even if most of them don’t even vaguely resemble reality there still isn’t enough motivation or information to exhaust the search space. Incomplete reductions are fine until there’s motivations for deeper explanations.
If you weren’t saying either of these things, then I’ve misunderstood you.
I grant you that; my assertion was one of type, not of degree. A predictive explanation will generally (yes, I am retracting my ‘almost always’ quantifier) be reductionist, but this a very different statement than the most reductionist explanation will be the best.
Less ‘distinct’ and more ‘abstracted’. The put it as pithy (and oversimplified) as possible, empiricism is about what is (probably) true, philosophy is about about what is (probably) necessarily true.
I could be more precise and accurate about my own thoughts here, but philosophy is one of those terms where if you ask ten different people you’ll get twelve different answers. The relation between philosophy and empirical reality depends on what ‘philosophy’ is.
I think confusion is inaccuracy at the meta level.
And besides that, I actually felt when writing that post that I was repeating ‘I was confused’ to the point of parody. Illusion of transparency, I suppose.
I’m for being ambiguous, but you’ll have be more precise about what I’m being ambiguous about. I can’t be clear about my terminology without knowing where I’m being unclear.
I don’t think it’s worth debating what I meant when I don’t mean it anymore.
It’s not clear what you’re saying here. If you’re talking about why the heart pumps blood instead of doing something else, that requires a historical explanation, a ‘why is it like this instead of like that’ and presumes the heart was optimized for something, and would have been optimized for something else if something had willed it.
If this is what you’re saying then yeah, the explanation will not be reductionist.
If you’re saying you can predict the broad strokes of what the heart will do without reducing all the way to the level of ‘function atoms’ then I completely agree. The space of explanations of reality at the level of atoms is large enough that even if most of them don’t even vaguely resemble reality there still isn’t enough motivation or information to exhaust the search space. Incomplete reductions are fine until there’s motivations for deeper explanations.
If you weren’t saying either of these things, then I’ve misunderstood you.