Hal Finney wrote:
>this argument ... 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.
I accept that implication. When you go and learn about physics for yourself,
you can then use what you know about other people's brains to infer that
they will likely come to the similar conclusions if they consider similar
evidence. You have then learned something about their cognition. You can
learn about what other people will think either by looking at their brains
and how they think, or by looking at the things they are thinking about,
and thinking about them yourself. Both approaches are productive and
have their place.
>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.
Yes, of course, a standard philosophical point. We only ever learn
about how we think the world is, and there may be things about the
world we can never learn.
>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.
As I elaborated in my reply to Dan, exact predictions aren't needed for
the general point that all we can know about ethics *is* an empirical
question, in the same way that all we can know about physics is an
empirical question.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:30 MDT