Apprentice comments on Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy - Less Wrong

106 Post author: lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

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Comment author: Apprentice 21 March 2011 05:26:40PM *  3 points [-]

Okay, but now I'm getting a bit confused. You seem to me to have come out with all the following positions:

  • The worthwhile branch of philosophy is Quinean. (this post)
  • Quine was a behaviorist. (a comment on this post)
  • Behaviorism denies the possibility of cognitive science. (a comment on this post)
  • The worthwhile part of philosophy is cognitive science. ("for me, philosophy basically just is cognitive science" - Lukeprog)

Those things don't seem to go well together. What am I misunderstanding?

Comment author: lukeprog 21 March 2011 05:35:31PM 0 points [-]

Quinean naturalism does not have an exclusive lock on useful philosophy, but it's the most productive because it starts from a bunch of the right assumptions (reductionism, naturalized epistemology, etc.)

Like I said, Quine was wrong about lots of things. Behaviorism was one of them. But Quine still saw epistemology as a chapter of the natural sciences on how human brains came to knowledge - the field we now know as "cognitive science."