Over at Firezdog they had a post on characterizing philosophy and distinguishing it from science. Originally I'd put a link on the sidebar, but my parenthetical comments got so long I figured I'd just make it a full post. In their opening paragraph "Firezdog" suggested that what distinguishes philosophers from scientists is that "philosophers are just as concerned with the way the world could be as with the way it is."
While I think this can be overstated somewhat I think it largely right. However I believe that most philosophers do want to capture the way the world actually is. That is they focus on the logic of more likely to be right views than those probably wrong. Thus most naturalists rarely engage with arguments that take Platonic entities seriously nor do they engage with say Thomist philosophy much. Why? Because they think it likely these are wrong.
Having said that though, in the realm of things socially judged more likely to be correct there is a lot of focus on what is possible. Put an other way, given certain limits (which typically seem socially determined) philosophers like to work out all the possibilities.
It seems to me these does lead to a certain "ghettoization" of philosophy. That is the physicalists rarely engage with say Platonists or Thomists - except in narrow areas. (i.e. perhaps the arguments for physicalism - but in those cases I think the Platonists or Thomists are cast in the role of the skeptic: the classic foe in philosophy) Likewise the Continental thinker and the Analytic thinker are in different social spheres and only occasionally interacts.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not ultimately sure this is a bad thing. When there is cross-polination it isn't always that great. Further, it's often just pointing out areas of common assertion rather than being a real engagement of the traditions. Of course this varies in degree. But I don't think we can ignore what one might call philosophical fads.
Of course, getting back to Firezdog's comments, perhaps these social segments is more due to what counts as possible. To many philosophers Cartesianism, for example, isn't "possible" in a normal sense. (It might be conceivable, but that's not the same thing as possible) Ditto with Plato and perhaps Thomas Aquinas. Is this right though? I'm not sure. Further for far too many philosophers these other traditions are known only through caricature rather than in terms of what's actually asserted.
You know, I'm not really sure what to say at this point, Clark. I think that the notion of possibility plays a deep and important role in philosophical methodology (especially in contemporary analytic methodology, but arguably ever since Kant inquired into 'the possibility of cognition', or whatever he called it), but I'm nonetheless prepared to recognize that possibility maybe explicable in naturalistic terms. This, for me, is the big issue -- whether or not epistemological considerations make naturalism implausible -- or whether naturalism, on the contrary, provides the only secure foundations for knowledge (don't I feel important using words like 'implausible' and 'secure foundations'!) -- and on a related note, whether knowledge, and therefore philosophy (to the extent that the two terms admit of such a connection) is to be or can be explained ultimately terms of evolution. I'd like to think not, and that was the drift of my post.
My problem is that "naturalism" seems such a problematic notion, except perhaps as a methadological claim. It's hard to characterize it as either an epistemological or metaphysical claim without ending up in lots of problems. Further, depending upon the discourse one is engaged in, naturalism or physicalism have different meanings. For instance by and large in philosophy of the mind it seems like naturalism is the claim that there aren't real qualia and no entities not "spatially" located. But, of course, "spatially located" is a bit hard to pin down given some of the vagueness in modern theoretical physics. So in practice it ends up, from what I can see, being the rejection of real irreducible qualia as well as the rejection of Thomist souls, Platonic entities, or Cartesian minds. Move into other fields and you get different oppositions though. It seems the terms have more to do with what positions they are against than any real definitive positive position. (All IMO of course)
The issue of possibility is difficult in terms of physicalism or naturalism as well. So, for instance, the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to take possibility rather seriously and ends up with a position not unlike certain views of modality that equate possibility and actuality in some ways.
As for naturalism providing the only secure basis for epistemology, I'm not sure even that is true, depending upon what one means by "secure." After all I'm not sure Quine's naturalized epistemology provides a "secure" foundation given his demand of holism and his position of underdetermination.
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