Tom Swann Old News
*27/6/09
Not surprising that I haven’t used this wiki as much as I wanted, but it is that I’m using it as much as I am. This I hope will change as I shift gears into the writing process.
After the trauma of the 20% coursework essay on Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality I’ve been taking it a little slow, but being exactly 4 months from D day this has to change stat. (This I say for my own good.) At least the coursework was in the same ballpark as the thesis, and I might be able to get some examples from it. In retrospect I think I presented some reasonable ideas, although they were a bit rough round the edges.
Have been paying a lot of attention recently to Huw Price’s work. He wants to develop a sort of naturalism that doesn’t take the task of philosophy to be that of ‘fitting’ problem classes of properties into the world as scientifically described. I think there is something in this. I’m reluctant to buy ‘reductions’ in general - water isn’t identical with H20 in an unrestricted, unambiguous sense. So I like the idea that saying something is cool is not to say it has some physical realiser, even if it does and if I also think it must. But I have reservations. The idea of many worlds as the disjoint commitments many discourses seems totally counterintuitive. It also might be incoherent, although this is not clear to me. My suspicion is that even to talk of commitments in social-linguistic terms, explaining how and why a community talks in such a way, one must understand the objects of commitment as part of the phenomena under examination. Which means that the naturalistic perspective would be committed to commitments to these things. Another problem is that Price’s linguistic functionalism seems to have it that to be X is to have ‘X’ said of it in a language-game. And conversely, it doesn’t say anything about when a language-game can be criticised as being in error. Pragmatism needs to leave room for criticism, and not just in accord with prevailing linguistic standards.
I’m also going to look at the afterword I from Mind and World, where Mc Dowell does a more thorough job than in the lectures of explaining what his problem is with naturalised epistemology.
Am a little scared at this stage, to tell the truth.
16/4/09 Only just starting to use this wiki properly, but I think it’s going to help alot with getting stuff written and structured. Know there are a few people watching: feel free to object wildly, or to ask questions about what I’m getting at, or whatever! Also I’ve had a lot of friends ask what I’m doing; it’ll be nice to be able to show them some bits of the process.
For this reason I’m going to have a go at writing a piece on what my topic is trying to get at and why I find it interesting. Hopefully this will also help me with my process of making my questions a bit more directed.
Tom Swann So Whats This All About Then
~~~ 24/3/09 Months of reading and poking around the unstable clusters of big concepts and ill-defined problems have culminated on a topic:
#normativity in a naturalistic world-picture.
I have to remind myself that this commitment is not yet much of a commitment: its two elements are just about as conceptually contentious as things can get, and the fact that this is largely because the question so utterly riddles modern philosophy fails to make it an achievement that I have pointed to it and said “I’m going to look at that!”. I’ll put mumblings about cutting down the problem space here: