This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 07 Jul 2008, by Jeremy Price.
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01 Jan 09
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07 Jul 08
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So this is a kind of branding success. It might represent a kind of scholarly success, but the jury will be out for a while, obviously. Regardless, it’s a success that interests me precisely because I spend a lot of time teaching students and trying to convince colleagues that anthropology is an empirical philosophy, one that professional philosophers would never attempt precisely because it requires all kind of commitments to the real world that are verboten in most mainstream philosophy departments.
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By this I and my fellow “empirical philosopher” anthropologists mean that anthropology might begin with the lingering questions of philosophers, but tests them amongst the people and (more precisely) collectivities of people for whom intuition, reason and logic are operative—people in the world. Ethnographic fieldwork is experiment, in this sense, even if it is methodologically distinct from the statistical model of survey and questionnaire represented by the experimental philosophers.
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it’s not just that philosophy is willfully ignorant of other sciences, only that it is slowly and deliberately working out ways to engage, incorporate and argue with results in those fields, precisely because of their power to convince, and hopefully to open up new questions and new avenues for critique that may or may not require more experiment.
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the implicit argument behind conducting experiment in philosophy—and a particular kind of experiment common in psychology, cognitive science—is that it will render the reasoning of philosophers more authoritative.
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Experiments don’t settle questions, they only render some answers unlikely.
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Is X-phi an ettempt to make philosophy more authoritative through experiment, or an attempt to make experimental work more philosophically rigorous?
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Whatever anthropology’s problems are, they do not arise because the discipline is not yet scientific, but because of having tried so hard to become scientific, that it has come out the other side, with its ambitions unfulfilled, and a serious tradition of doubt that “becoming scientific” can necssarily be the pinnacle of achievement. For that pinnacle, many in the discipline still look towards philosophy, and so it makes it all the more disorienting to see that discipline suddenly wandering up the path behind us.
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