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PHIL408O - Morality and Cognitive Science

Notes

6 February 2012

Normative Ethics

Right is not just good, it is morally obligatoryMorally permissible (circle outside)

Morally impermissible = it is morally obligatory not to do something

Rights --> duty

^ correlative

How moral properties are related to non moral properties

Hume philosophy - morality is in our heads?

Aprobation (positive projection) vs disaprobation (negative projection)

Social Convention - gender, religion?

vs Natural - formal logic

ethics somewhere in the middle?

re religion:

Sperber, Dan

Atran, Scott

emotivism = boo horay view of moral judgement = non-cognitivism

normative ethics vs. meta-ethics

Rationalism:

The Intuition/Deduction Thesis: Some propositions in a particular subject area, S, are knowable

by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions.

The second thesis associated with rationalism is the Innate Knowledge thesis.

The Innate Knowledge Thesis: We have knowledge of some truths in a particular subject area, S,

as part of our rational nature.

The Innate Concept Thesis: We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject

area, S, as part of our rational nature.

The Indispensability of Reason Thesis: The knowledge we gain in subject area, S, by intuition

and deduction, as well as the ideas and instances of knowledge in S that are innate to us, could

not have been gained by us through sense experience.

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The Superiority of Reason Thesis: The knowledge we gain in subject area S by intuition and

deduction or have innately is superior to any knowledge gained by sense experience.

Empiricism:

Empiricists endorse the following claim for some subject area.

The Empiricism Thesis: We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S

other than sense experience.

Sense experience is our only source of ideas.

It entails that knowledge can only be gained, if at all , by experience.

Good philosophy is empirically informed

Psychology doesn’t split from philosophy until 19th century

Early 20th century: Freud and Behaviourism

-discovers the unconscious

Behaviourism - mind is best studied via observable behaviour

Chomsky @ center of cognitive revolution @ end of 20th century

Mind is like a computer

Description vs explanation

Explaining involves: why is it this way and not some other possible way?

Fodor, Jerry: “The Modularity of Mind”

Muller-Lyer Illusion

Moral faculty = moral module?

Language module isn’t borne out by stroke victims: this is testable, right?

Positing modules in the mind is motivated by the desire to get a set of phenomena into the right

shape so that you can start reducing things to neuro-physiology.

Faculty = a much more abstract concept

Brains are innately constrained = Explanations are all about constraints

Cognitive faculty = a set of constraints that characterize its operation

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Carroll, Sean - Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Faculty/ module distinction “faculty disputes” by John Collins “Mind & Language” 2004

Rationalism doesn’t adequately account for correlation between our mind’s conception and the

real world

Maybe we construct the truth?

Epistemologically constrained version of truth