gwern comments on Metaphilosophical Mysteries - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Wei_Dai 27 July 2010 12:55AM

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Comment author: gwern 27 July 2010 05:26:26PM 7 points [-]

I think psychology is very strongly an example. You have only to read some old psychology textbooks. I read William James's Principles of Psychology (for a Wittgenstein course) from exactly a century ago, and it was a mix of extremely low-level unexplained experimental results and philosophical argumentation about minds and souls (James spending quite a bit of time attacking non-materialist views, of which there were no shortage of proponents). To point to some of the experiments decades earlier and say that it'd already split off is like pointing at Aristotle's biology work as the start of the split between natural philosophy and biology.