tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-64162362616394974172007-11-08T15:48:00.000-05:002007-11-08T15:48:00.000-05:00Hi Don - you're right, my clarification to Wes wasn't quite accurate. I should've simply said that my criticisms are limited to those elements of experimental philosophy discussed in the main post (which goes beyond just conceptual-analysis-by-survey, but at any rate doesn't claim to be exhaustive).<BR/><BR/>On the substantive issues:<BR/>(1) It seems to me that the question whether "moral disputes would vanish if there were agreement on the non-moral facts" (and, crucially, if all parties were sufficiently rational) is simply the question whether the non-moral truths rationally entail determinate moral conclusions. And that's not an empirical question at all, right?<BR/><BR/>(2) I agree that it takes empirical work to find out if other folk have the same concepts we do, or if we're just talking past each other/ "changing the subject". Maybe we're speaking different languages. That'd be linguistically interesting. But what does it have to do with philosophy? (I want to analyze <I>free will</I>, say, this very concept I already have a grasp of -- not just whatever other folk refer to by 'free will', since that could be anything at all, and so not necessarily what I'm interested in.)<BR/><BR/>DK - Yeah, I'm pretty sympathetic to the "bold claim". It's a tricky issue, though. Internalizing false theories may cause our intuitions to go awry, but this is just as true of the unarticulated "theories" that permeate our background culture. I guess if academic speculations are more likely to be misguided than the inherited "wisdom of the ages" (so to speak) then that'd give us some reason to favour folk intuitions. But I don't see any special advantage to being "unaware of the philosophical implications of such seemings". The epistemic work is instead being done by a kind of Burkean conservatism, and pessimism about the quality of the new theories that seek to supersede commonsense. (Cf. my remarks about "meta-evidence" toward the end of the post.)Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com