“The conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises.”
Huh? If Beth’s brain can’t reason about the world then she can’t know that humans are stimulus-response engines. (I’m not concerned with where in her brain the reasoning happens, just that it happens in her brain somewhere)
I was going to object a bit to this example, too, but since you’re already engaged with it here I’ll jump in.
I think reasoning about these theories as saying humans are “just” stimulus-response engines strawmans some of these theories. I feel similarly about the mental nonrealism example. In both cases there are better versions of these theories that aren’t so easily shown as non-self-ratifying, although I realize you wanted versions here for illustrative purposes. Just a complication to the context of mentioning classes of theories where only the “worst” version of serves as an example, thus is likely to raise objections that fail to notice the isolation to only the worst version.
I was going to object a bit to this example, too, but since you’re already engaged with it here I’ll jump in.
I think reasoning about these theories as saying humans are “just” stimulus-response engines strawmans some of these theories. I feel similarly about the mental nonrealism example. In both cases there are better versions of these theories that aren’t so easily shown as non-self-ratifying, although I realize you wanted versions here for illustrative purposes. Just a complication to the context of mentioning classes of theories where only the “worst” version of serves as an example, thus is likely to raise objections that fail to notice the isolation to only the worst version.