“that’s not the sort of thing that ever could conflict with science!” do you mean to include psychology in ‘science’ if so, why would you care about it then?
Psychology could (and often does!) show that the way we think about our own minds is just unhelpful in some way: actually, we work differently. I think the job of philosophy is to clarify what we’re actually doing when we talk about our minds, say, regardless of whether that turns out to be a sensible way to talk about them. Psychology might then counsel that we ditch that way of talking! Sometimes we might get to that conclusion from within philosophy; e.g. Parfit’s conclusion that our notion of personal identity is just pretty incoherent.
I meant to suggest that any philosophy which could never conflict with science is immediately suspicious unless you mean something relatively narrow by ‘science’ (for example, by excluding psychology). If you claim that something could never be disproven by science, that’s pretty close to saying ‘it won’t ever affect your decisions’, in which case, why care?
I think of philosophy as more like trying to fix the software that your brain runs on. Which includes, for example, how you categorize the outside world, and also your own model of yourself. That sounds like it ought to be the stamping ground of cognitive science, but we actually have a nice, high-level access to this kind of thing that doesn’t involve thinking about neurons at all: language. So we can work at that level, instead (or as well).
A lot of the stuff in the Sequences, for example, falls under this: it’s an investigation into what the hell is going on with our mindware, (mostly) done at the high level of language.
(Disclaimer: Philosophers differ a lot about what they think philsophy does/should do. Some of them definitely do think that it can tell you stuff about the world that science can’t, or that it can overrule it, or any number of crazy things!)
“that’s not the sort of thing that ever could conflict with science!” do you mean to include psychology in ‘science’ if so, why would you care about it then?
Psychology could (and often does!) show that the way we think about our own minds is just unhelpful in some way: actually, we work differently. I think the job of philosophy is to clarify what we’re actually doing when we talk about our minds, say, regardless of whether that turns out to be a sensible way to talk about them. Psychology might then counsel that we ditch that way of talking! Sometimes we might get to that conclusion from within philosophy; e.g. Parfit’s conclusion that our notion of personal identity is just pretty incoherent.
I meant to suggest that any philosophy which could never conflict with science is immediately suspicious unless you mean something relatively narrow by ‘science’ (for example, by excluding psychology). If you claim that something could never be disproven by science, that’s pretty close to saying ‘it won’t ever affect your decisions’, in which case, why care?
I think of philosophy as more like trying to fix the software that your brain runs on. Which includes, for example, how you categorize the outside world, and also your own model of yourself. That sounds like it ought to be the stamping ground of cognitive science, but we actually have a nice, high-level access to this kind of thing that doesn’t involve thinking about neurons at all: language. So we can work at that level, instead (or as well).
A lot of the stuff in the Sequences, for example, falls under this: it’s an investigation into what the hell is going on with our mindware, (mostly) done at the high level of language.
(Disclaimer: Philosophers differ a lot about what they think philsophy does/should do. Some of them definitely do think that it can tell you stuff about the world that science can’t, or that it can overrule it, or any number of crazy things!)