There's something absurd about trying to settle complicated metaphysical questions from the philosophical armchair--but sometimes there's value in trying our best to do exactly that.
You describe only half of the modern meta philosophical dilemma. The part you mention is that at some point in the seventeenth century it became clear that there was a way to make progress on questions of how nature worked in a way that undermined faith in intuition, armchair theorizing and old books. Modern science is too successful for most philosophers just to reject. One possibility is that a certain training with old controversies and making certain kinds of conceptual distinctions will prove useful on the margins to this enterprise. Another is to try to create a specific science of semantics (which is where the bizarre interest in how undergraduates would use the word “know” in contrived examples about barns comes in).
The second half you don’t confront though. Modernity wasn’t just about science it was also about formal human equality. This undermines the idea that there is a normative expert. This is tied to the scientific revolution in that the latter avoids Aristotlean final causes in favour of efficient ones. But it also is represented by the bourgeois revolutionary idea that authority is never given by nature but only as a matter of voluntary representation.
So while natural science is of no help at all in making moral progress, it doesn’t follow that philosophy has any use here either. Hume concluded that normative premises are really just a matter of sentiment. Even Kant could just see them as formal, not substantive.
Intuition seems to matter here not because we can conclude that something is desirable because people desire it but because we have no epistemically-respectable alternative. I don’t think it will really do to say the contribution of philosophy is to make these intuitions more “coherent” because there is also no reason to prefer coherence to incoherence in this domain.
What philosophy could do is explore how scientific discourse and ordinary discourse can “hang together” as Sellars put it. It seems to me that is what compatibilism really is about. Is there a way of reconceiving our moral or even religious ways of talking that avoids conflict with science? That isn’t hoping to contribute particularly substantively to either but it seems like something where conceptual analysis and knowledge of the old controversies might come in handy.
If the question of theories of time can be reduced to differences in how we talk, then we could say this is a matter for a science of semantics/pragmatics and philosophy could be a branch of linguistics. It could perhaps be shown that there is no genuine conflict between general relativity and our ordinary sense of the flow of time. And maybe some limited role for undergraduate intuition would be respectable. In linguistics, it is relevant how competent language speakers use words. But if you view this as a real issue of fact, then it is really hard to see why the intuitions of PMC Anglophones in the twenty first century are of any interest at all.
Ben, it seems like the “philosophy” you are defending here is the form of analytical philosophy that is heavily reliant on how undergraduates respond intuitively to far out thought experiments. I still don’t see how that could ever inform you about anything other than undergraduate intuition.
You describe only half of the modern meta philosophical dilemma. The part you mention is that at some point in the seventeenth century it became clear that there was a way to make progress on questions of how nature worked in a way that undermined faith in intuition, armchair theorizing and old books. Modern science is too successful for most philosophers just to reject. One possibility is that a certain training with old controversies and making certain kinds of conceptual distinctions will prove useful on the margins to this enterprise. Another is to try to create a specific science of semantics (which is where the bizarre interest in how undergraduates would use the word “know” in contrived examples about barns comes in).
The second half you don’t confront though. Modernity wasn’t just about science it was also about formal human equality. This undermines the idea that there is a normative expert. This is tied to the scientific revolution in that the latter avoids Aristotlean final causes in favour of efficient ones. But it also is represented by the bourgeois revolutionary idea that authority is never given by nature but only as a matter of voluntary representation.
So while natural science is of no help at all in making moral progress, it doesn’t follow that philosophy has any use here either. Hume concluded that normative premises are really just a matter of sentiment. Even Kant could just see them as formal, not substantive.
Intuition seems to matter here not because we can conclude that something is desirable because people desire it but because we have no epistemically-respectable alternative. I don’t think it will really do to say the contribution of philosophy is to make these intuitions more “coherent” because there is also no reason to prefer coherence to incoherence in this domain.
What philosophy could do is explore how scientific discourse and ordinary discourse can “hang together” as Sellars put it. It seems to me that is what compatibilism really is about. Is there a way of reconceiving our moral or even religious ways of talking that avoids conflict with science? That isn’t hoping to contribute particularly substantively to either but it seems like something where conceptual analysis and knowledge of the old controversies might come in handy.
If the question of theories of time can be reduced to differences in how we talk, then we could say this is a matter for a science of semantics/pragmatics and philosophy could be a branch of linguistics. It could perhaps be shown that there is no genuine conflict between general relativity and our ordinary sense of the flow of time. And maybe some limited role for undergraduate intuition would be respectable. In linguistics, it is relevant how competent language speakers use words. But if you view this as a real issue of fact, then it is really hard to see why the intuitions of PMC Anglophones in the twenty first century are of any interest at all.
Ben, it seems like the “philosophy” you are defending here is the form of analytical philosophy that is heavily reliant on how undergraduates respond intuitively to far out thought experiments. I still don’t see how that could ever inform you about anything other than undergraduate intuition.