Summing up the way I've been thinking so far

I'm about to dig into a more substantial phase of research now. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be trying to understand what an explanation of the world is, and what the differences are between science, math, and ethics in this regard. So before I do, I want to clarify what I'm going into this research with, what my hypothesis (of sorts) is. I can't really defend this view; it's just a starting point, a bunch of suspicions that I have.

Without a doubt there is something that is quite different about ethics, science and math. Pinning down exactly what is really the challenge, and the next challenge is trying to figure out what those differences should mean--why the differences matter.

My general hypothesis is that hard, strong, epistemological lines tend to break down under stress. For example, Quine convinced most of the philosophical world that there is no strong, philosophically useful distinction between the meaning of words in a sentence and the substance of those sentences; there's no strong dichotomy between analytic sentences and synthetic ones. The argument comes down to just applying a great deal of stress to the dichotomy, and watching it collapse under investigation. I expect, coming into a philosophical investigation, a similar thing to happen when we've set up boundaries between realms of knowledge. Facts/values, empirical/non-empirical, a priori/a posteriori, history/science, objective/subjective and of course science/math/ethics are all ways that people have tried to divide up realms of knowledge. The problem is not dividing up realms of knowledge itself--everyone does that because there are real differences between the areas--but when it comes to epistemology, how we know what we know about these realms, I expect the dichotomies to break down. I expect that the way we gain historical knowledge isn't very different from the way we gain scientific knowledge. I expect that the way we gain mathematical knowledge isn't so different from the way we gain scientific or ethical knowledge. That's my hypothesis, in general. It's heavily influenced by Quine and Putnam (and Dewey, through Putnam), I think. At the very least, it's influenced by a misinterpretation of Quine and Putnam.

So, in particular, I expect that the distinctions between how we gain ethical knowledge and how we gain scientific knowledge break down under pressure. I expect that all knowledge is more or less in the same boat. I suspect that the differences are all of quantity, and not quality of knowledge. So I suspect that any attempt to explain why scientific stuff is objective and ethical or mathematical stuff is not eventually breaks down. I think that the indispensability argument goes a good way towards showing how the distinction breaks down between math and science, and I suspect that something similar can be adapted for ethics. I think that there are at least two good, promising ways of doing this, but in the end every way of making the argument does it by trying to make science a little bit more modest.

But I started by saying that there are real differences between math and ethics and science? It's just a fact that there are no ethics laboratories in universities, and it doesn't strike us as a very good idea to start such labs. Why is that? An analogy from math is useful in clarifying the question. Once Quine/Putnam argue that math is actually empirical knowledge and as objectively known as science, they need to answer the question: what fooled people for so long? Why did people think that math was a priori and divorced from experience? So, if you argue that ethics is on the same par as science, you have to explain why ethics strikes people as being the sort of thing that it doesn't make sense to start a lab for.

Of course, you could say that people are wrong, and that we really should be building ethics labs of some sort. Some people--I think that I heard this in the name of Nagel or Parfit--think that ethics is just a young science, one that's bound to develop the way that other sciences have. So maybe these people think that opening ethics labs makes sense. But I'm more sympathetic to the position that there is something about ethics that makes such a notion strange. I guess this could be consistent with the view that we should open labs, but I guess the view I find most attractive is that ethics is really really really hard. (This is also the reason why I'm not swayed by an argument from disagreement that ethics is subjective. Disagreement is consistent not only with subjective views, but also with really really really hard ones.) I bet that I could even show that some things that eventually fell into the realm of science were considered subjective problems, ones that it wouldn't make sense for a lab to study. For example, I bet a lot of brain stuff fits this pattern.

How does this relate to the original program of contrasting math with ethics? Well, the idea is that by taking an argument that's found in the math literature, and seeing how it holds up under ethics we'll be able to see what math and ethics have in common. And my guess is that math and ethics can be both shown to be close to science when it comes to epistemology. And that the differences in the way they have been considered have to do with how hard/easy studying the subject is (math is more objective cuz we're able to isolate variables, ethics is REALLY hard cuz there are so many variables, math is a priori because it's an essential part of the web of beleif, ethics barely seems like knowledge because it's so hard to get secure on it, etc.).