Question What are some questions that we might be reasonably tempted to believe are answerable by psychology but that are actually only answerable by philosophy? Thank you very much.

Accepted:
August 10, 2020

Comments

Someone might reasonably

Someone might reasonably think that the question what personal identity consists of is to be answered by psychology. So we can imagine looking at the formation of individuality over time, through childhood and on, and think we were answering the philosophical question what identity consists of. Clearly psychology cannot pre-empt the answer to the question whether, for example, the bodily criterion of identity is correct. There are a lot of other examples to choose from. The one I am most interested in at the moment is perception. Perceiving, as Ryle points out, is not a process, but the termination of one, like scoring a goal, to use Ryle's example. You can't ask how long it took to perceive a goat, and you ask how long the scoring of a goal took. You can ask of course in a different way how long it took Aston Villa to score a goal - the whole of the first half, say. It took them forty-five minutes. But what about the actual scoring? That is as you might say instantaneous. It happens when the ball crosses the goal-line, whenever that is. I imagine it is the first moment at which any bit of the ball, no matter how small, enters the goal or has crossed the line.

Question What are some questions that we might be reasonably tempted to believe are answerable by psychology but that are actually only answerable by philosophy? Thank you very much. Accepted:August 10, 2020

Question What are some questions that we might be reasonably tempted to believe are answerable by psychology but that are actually only answerable by philosophy? Thank you very much.

Accepted:
August 10, 2020