Saturday, December 26, 2009

What is non-naturalism?

I really don't have a firm grasp of this concept.

If one is a non-naturalist about ethics, then this means that one thinks that ethical properties are not natural ones. Well, what's a natural property? Attempt one: it's a property in the universe. Well that's not helpful! That just means that a non-natural property is one that doesn't exist (because I assume that the universe is just the class of all things that exist). OK, so maybe the natural properties are the ones studied by scientists. By that definition I suppose that a lot of properties that are physical could be non-natural ones. So maybe the natural properties are the ones that could be studied by scientists. What's the point of this definition; is the point just that scientists are able to study properties that can be found in space, are physical? So then all it means to be non-natural is to be an abstract object? That could be, but that doesn't pick out anything but abstract objects, obviously, so it's superfluous terminology.

I can think of two other definitions of non-natural properties. I need to read more so that I have a firmer idea of what it means. One definition would be that it is relevant for scientific explanations, or indispensable to explanations. This merges the natural properties with the ones that are derived from IBE, obviously. Again, not so interesting, but possible. The second definition is that the non-natural properties are those that we have to take as primitive. This won't quite do because then you'll have some physical properties that are non-natural. Grr. Not really sure what to do here.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Philosophical Progress

Since philosophy folks are always feeling defensive about philosophical progress, lemme say something concerning that. I remember in the introduction to "Realism with a human face" that there was a quote from Putnam. It went along the lines of: "There are almost never answers to philosophical questions, but there are better and worse ways to think about the questions." This is one way that philosophical progress occurs: there are some deep questions that might ultimately be unresolvable, but there are better and worse ways of struggling with these issues.

For example, you might wonder whether God exists. And so you might start looking into believing in things that you can't see or directly observe, that kind of inference, etc. And then you can have a whole long debate about that. But along might come some philosophers and say "You're thinking about belief in God all wrong, because what it means to believe in God isn't what you guys have been assuming it means, and so your debate has been misdirected." In this sorta-inspired-by-maybe-real-philosophy scenario, there has been philosophical progress through a clarification of what is worth debating.

To ethics: I get the feeling that the philosophical community has been moving, for a while now, towards a broadening of debates about ethics that have lasted a couple hundred years. I don't have the kind of knowledge to really defend this, but one gets the sense that at a certain point folks realized that what ethics distinctive and queer--it's normative properties--could be found in lots of other things. It's routine to point out that this is true about epistemology and what justifies are beliefs and makes some better than the others. But it's also been recognized in philosophy of perception too.

So the sense I get is that progress has been made on problems of ethics, insofar as we've recognized that the queerness of ethics is really just it's membership in a larger domain, that of the normative. And now there's focus on the normative, and people tending to deal with the normative all at once. This seems to me a better way of thinking about ethics, as part of the normative realm, and an example of philosophical progress and an insight that the rest of the world is going to owe philosophers who spend years sludging through, trying to figure out what's going on. We'll end up with a much better understanding of what it means to be moral, and we'll have a better understanding of what obligates us, and this will lead to different ways of thinking about how we treat each other.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

And we've moved on to another area of research!

Again with the shifting from area of philosophy to area of philosophy...but this shift is more natural than the previous ones, and it's been coming on for a while.

http://philpapers.org/browse/epistemic-normativity-misc

But this page seems like a potential gold mine of things to read and ponder about. In short, the questions I'm thinking about now are about the differences and similarities and interconnectedness of statements such as "you morally ought to do X" and "you epistemic ally ought to believe X". Right now I'm feeling out arguments that try to blur these, not sure how I feel about it yet.

Ah, philosophy of math! How I miss you so. Hopefully there will be a way to bring it back in.