PHIL408O - Morality and Cognitive Science Notes

6 February 2012 Normative Ethics Right is not just good, it is morally obligatory Morally 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.

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 doesnt 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 isnt 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

Carroll, Sean - Endless Forms Most Beautiful Faculty/ module distinction faculty disputes by John Collins Mind & Language 2004 Rationalism doesnt adequately account for correlation between our minds conception and the real world Maybe we construct the truth? Epistemologically constrained version of truth