Topics Philosophy

Question Psychology is advancing at a rapid rate and it's providing us with answers that were previously unthought of. Who we are and why we act the way we do is all being deciphered in a scientific and irrefutable way. In light of this change in the human attempt to understand itself, why should people continue to waste their energies in the non-empirical and unscientific approach known as philosophy?

Accepted:
October 15, 2005

Comments

Here are some reactions, each of which would require greater amplification and defense:

1) If psychology is a science, then it's results are not irrefutable. Science doesn't prove claims to be true in the way mathematics does. It's a fallible enterprise, and even its strongest results are advanced in the knowledge that they just might be wrong.

2) Quite a few philosophers are not impressed by what they consider bureaucratic boundaries and take themselves to be working on the same problems that psychologists are, perhaps at a slightly greater level of abstraction. They believe that their own work is really of a piece with psychological research: both constrained by it and simultaneously contributing to it. Their contributions don't usually consist in gathering data with which to test theories, but rather in the clarification and development of concepts or claims that figure in those theories.

3) Finally, some philosophers are skeptical that many of the most vexing philosophical problems about the mind are amenable to resolution through empirical inquiry. These philosophers believe that our perennial philosophical problems arise from deep and stubborn conceptual confusions whose dissipation will not be furthered by empirical psychology. For them, to look to psychology for philosophical relief is simply to look in the wrong direction.

If you want to know what love is, you'll learn more at this point from Pablo Neruda and the Song of Solomon than you will from all the psychologists in the world. And I venture that there will always be something you can learn from Neruda that the psychologists will not be able to teach you.

That's not to argue for some kind of dualism (though there's a way of taking these reflections that would bring them quite close to Jackson's knowledge argument). It's simply to say that "understanding oneself" can mean many things. I'm sure psychology has something to teach us here. But so does literature. And what philosophy has to contribute to this particular enterprise may be more along the latter lines than along the former.