Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Attempts to formulate a naturalistic epistemology are often anchored by the notion that undirected evolution would lead us naturally to have accurate beliefs. Some people have doubted this approach works, but let's say it does. It basically says that we perceive, say, tigers and lions as a threat to us because, well, they are a threat to us, and heights make us cautious because falling from a great height will kill us, we think sex is good because sex propagates the species, we seek out food because we really do need food, and so on. Isn't it odd, then, that went evidence turns up for an evolutionary basis for religion, this approach is thrown right out the window, and the ubiquity of religion in human societies is explained by everything other than evolution leading us to accurately perceive a spiritual dimension to life? It is almost as though these researchers had had their minds made up about religion in advance!

Here : "His aim in this chapter, then, is to give a naturalistic vindication of values; an account of ethics that fits with secularism but doesn't reduce the ethical life to the expression of subjective attitudes. As he notes (p. 28) it is common to think of moral or ethical standards as independent of human desires and aspirations, having a sort of objectivity that fits well with their being divinely commanded. On Kitcher's account, of course, these standards don't originate in anything like a divine command, and Kitcher's account of ethics and morality doesn't give it that sort of objectivity. What status do ethical standards have, according to him? It's not easy to tell. As far as I could make out, Kitcher believes that ethical rules have simply evolved over the centuries as a means to the reduction of 'functional conflict' (p. 53) and the promotion of harmony in a society. It's a good idea for us (as members of a society) to follow these ...

I thought I smelt a shibboleth the other day, and lo and behold, a couple of days later, I find "Mr. Shibboleth" himself, Noah Smith, signalling his membership in the ingroup: "Just as an ecologist would assume that an ecosystem is working fine unless there were something obviously going wrong, economists tend to assume that markets are working OK unless there is obviously something the matter. The basic results in economic theory that say that "markets are good," although expressed in terms of voluntary exchange, utility maximization, etc., are really just formalizations of this naturalistic assumption." (Emphasis mine.) Humans have been around for 100,000 years, give or take, depending on who you count as human, etc. Out of a very long time, markets have only dominated human life in a small part of the globe for a very small stretch of that time, and their "goodness" has been questioned as far back as we can discern. So how is this assum...

Mary Morgan's The World in the Model obviously is giving me a lot of food for thought, as you know if you have been reading here recently. It attempts to understand the role of modeling in economics by looking at the history of modeling in economics. One thing it reinforces for me is something I learned from Collingwood, which is that to fully understand some subject, one must understand its history: you can know all about the state-of-the-art for some field, but until you grasp why it became the state-of-the-art, and what the competing alternatives were, you only know half the story. But I do have a couple of minor gripes. One is about her use of the word "naturalize." (Or "naturalise": a related, even more minor annoyance is that the book switches back-and-forth between the American and the British spelling, probably a fault of the publisher, and not of Morgan.) Let me offer some examples of her usage, along with my comments: * "Yet, its ambition i...

Now, no one has a patent or copyright on the use of the word "naturalism," so anything one says about what it means can be contradicted somewhere in the works of people who call themselves adherents of naturalism. Therefore I am just going to describe a typical view that I have seen out there : "Nothing exists except the sort of things described in the theories of physics." (That exact definition of naturalism is not given in the Wikipedia entry, but I know I have seen it stated: if this were an academic paper, I would go hunt down the exact place I saw it, but this is just a blog post.) There is a rather obvious incoherence in this idea: One of the things that is very much not described by the theories of physics is.. the theories of physics. (These theories are about quarks and electrons and photons and forces and so on: they never are about theories themselves , or how theories come to exist, or causal relationships between theories, etc.) Therefore, the theor...

Here , discussing Alex Rosenberg: The first argument claims that “neuroscience makes eliminativism about propositional attitudes unavoidable.” A propositional attitude is a relation between a thinker and a certain proposition or content. When we say that Fred believes that it is raining, we are attributing to him the attitude of believing the proposition that it is raining; when we say that Ethel hopes that it is sunny, we are attributing to her the attitude of hoping that the proposition that it is sunny is true; and so forth. Neuroscience, Rosenberg tells us, shows that there is no such thing as believing, hoping, fearing, desiring, or the like. Now in fact, it takes very little thought to see that “neuroscience” shows no such thing. For there is nothing in the neuroscientific evidence cited by Rosenberg that couldn’t be accepted by an Aristotelian, a Cartesian, a Wittgensteinian, a Whiteheadian, or an adherent of some other metaphysics. What Rosenberg should say is: “Neur...