Readers will recall Massimo Pigliucci, that interesting philosopher of science who recently declined into a groupie for the war on denialism (dissent). Science goes NoKo?*
That said, here he is, saying nice things about Jerry (What Darwin Got Wrong) Fodor (= it is still possible to have a reasonable discussion?)
Just before this passage in the same paper, Fodor argues a related, even more interesting point:
“If only physical particles weren’t so small (if only brains were on the outside, where one can get a look at them), then we would do physics instead of paleontology (neurology instead of psychology; psychology instead of economics; and so on down). [But] even if brains were out where they can be looked at, as things now stand, we wouldn’t know what to look for: we lack the appropriate theoretical apparatus for the psychological taxonomy of neurological events.”
The idea, I take it, is that when physicists like Weinberg (for instance) tell me (as he actually did, during Sean Carroll’s naturalism workshop [11]) that “in principle” all knowledge of the world is reducible to physics, one is perfectly within one’s rights to ask (as I did of Weinberg) what principle, exactly, is he referring to. Fodor contends that if one were to call up the epistemic bluff the physicists would have no idea of where to even begin to provide a reduction of sociology, economics, psychology, biology, etc. to fundamental physics. There is, it seems, no known “principle” that would guide anyone in pursuing such a quest – a far more fundamental issue from the one imposed by merely practical limits of time and calculation. To provide an analogy, if I told you that I could, given the proper amount of time and energy, list all the digits of the largest known prime number, but then decline to actually do so because, you know, the darn thing’s got 12,978,189 digits, you couldn’t have any principled objection to my statement. But if instead I told you that I can prove to you that there is an infinity of prime numbers, you would be perfectly within your rights to ask me at the least the outline of such proof (which exists, by the way), and you should certainly not be content with any vague gesturing on my part to the effect that I don’t see any reason “in principle” why there should be a limit to the set of prime numbers.
More.
Yes, but you must be allowed to think that, Massimo, without getting your head bashed in.
*Science goes NoKo: When anything goes NoKo, there are Winners and losers. The big Winners are ideologically correct mediocrities with attack dogs, actual, virtual, or metaphorical. The big loser is the life of the mind.
And the “aren’t I good?” girls wave pom poms for the Winners. It’s their job. Maybe all they can do.
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