Abstract
Philosophers now regularly appeal to data from neuroscience and psychology to settle longstanding disputes between competing philosophical theories, such as theories of moral decision-making and motivation. Such naturalistic projects typically aim to promote continuity between philosophy and the sciences by attending to the empirical constraints that the sciences impose on conceptual disputes in philosophy. This practice of checking philosophical theories of moral agency against the available empirical data is generally encouraging, yet it can leave unexamined crucial empirical assumptions that lie at the foundations of the traditional philosophical disputes. To illustrate this, I compare recent work in the neuroscience of decision to traditional philosophical theories of motivation and argue that the traditional theories are largely incompatible with empirical developments. This shows that genuine continuity between philosophy and science means that in some instances the conceptual foundations required to explain the phenomenon of interest be developed by the sciences themselves.
Highlights
Philosophers regularly appeal to data from neuroscience and psychology to settle longstanding disputes between competing philosophical theories, such as theories of moral decision-making and motivation
I have argued, any such naturalistic approaches that leave unexamined the conceptual frameworks of traditional philosophical disputes are likely to fall short of genuine continuity
The discontinuity between philosophical accounts of judgment and motivation, with their folk psychological (FP) frameworks, and the developing empirical sciences of decision, such as neuroeconomics, shows not just that we may have been too willing as philosophers to invent our psychology from scratch (Darwall, et al 1992), but more importantly that we have so far paid too little attention to the ways in which the special sciences can themselves guide important conceptual developments
Summary
Philosophical theories that employ FP concepts to deal with the phenomena of judgment and motivation, especially those that aim to achieve results compatible with the results in the sciences, will need to show that FP is up to the task of capturing these details. As the Allais paradox and Gauker’s argument about a belief-desire law show, people do not go around shaping the world to their minds Such an explanation for choice behavior is not just unsatisfying but false. If the commonsense concept of desire can be made relevant to the explanation of choice, it will not be by virtue of a vague (or possibly metaphorical) explanation of commonsense psychological states in terms of directions of fit For this would require an explanation of choice in terms of desire-as-world-shaping that explains why a state that is defined in terms of an agent’s world shaping is a state that often flatly fails to predict how an agent will attempt to shape the world. Though, it seems to me that this result is to be expected given the way in which the concepts most relevant to the explanation of choice and motivation have developed along with the sciences
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