Well, Peter, the program of philosophy is impartial to making one comfortable with one’s convictions. But I think we already pretty much understand each other on the major points. There isn’t much disparity between us on the major issues at this junction, so there isn’t any reason to classify me as one who is doing nothing but philosophy with no appreciation of science or no knowledge of how to be scientific. Science is a data-gathering-analyzing-synthesizing program. Philosophy is the vehicle for an agent to divorce herself from being the data-gathering-analyzing-synthesizing automaton, and does so with unprecedented results. That’s not to say that scientific disciplines haven’t or don’t largely break away from philosophical inquiry, but philosophy helps to formulate and clarify the questions and problems of scientific disciplines (sometimes to the chagrin of scientists who might tend to oversimplify things for the sake of their unexamined purposes), even if science ultimately is required to answer them – and that’s only a very narrow description of philosophy.
You indicate your intuitions count for something. Perhaps mine might count for something, too. It will be a mistake for me to be a scientist and engineer without a cognitive framework made possible only by a combination of philosophy, logic, and mathematics, because I’d be an automaton taking my convictions and courses of action for granted. I may need to defend them in the events I would need a greater rationality mass than my opponents – or in the event parts of my cognition need a greater rationality mass than the other parts! Perhaps you won’t need to develop this level of defense, although the impression I got, as to the reason for this thread, suggested you might.
Is nothing I say fair?
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