>I can't make sense of any of that, or see how it is relevant to what you were quoting from my post. Are you suggesting that logical positivism is correct, or that it's ok for scientists (and for you) to ignore the philosophy of science, or something else? Vague references to "trying to create structures with a certain known function" are just impossible for me to interpret without some explanation of what they're supposed to mean.
Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
> The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time.
They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening. When solving chemical equations, you must take into account atomic numbers, which they did long before knowing about atoms. There's no a priori reason why certain compounds must always be in certain proportions. All they knew is it worked well.
> Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct.
So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct? Geometry has real world consequences that don't change if brain structure changes. Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
> I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts.
It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes. If you claim moral beliefs aren't based on reality then clearly they're arbitrary.
>Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
Again, all of this is too vague to either agree with or disagree with. If you read the relevant philosophical literature, you'll find that it's very hard to say exactly what words like "predictive", "model", etc. should actually mean in this context. Do you mean that theories have to make verifiable predictions? Falsifiable predictions? What exactly do you mean by verifiability or falsifiability? Do you believe that observations can be made independently of theory? Do you agree with Quine that confirmation and refutation are holistic? To say that scientists attempt to construct predictive models is to say virtually nothing of any content. This is why it is not a good idea for scientists to parrot phrases like "verifiable", "observable", etc. without at least trying to get a grasp of some of the issues surrounding them.
>They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening.
No, that's not true. Their theories were based on constructing hypotheses and testing them (an oversimplication of course, but basically true). That is a rational method. The fact that they didn't know exactly what atomic numbers were doesn't make it any less rational. (After all, we still don't know exactly what atoms are.)
>So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct?
Their correspondence with the moral facts of the matter.
>Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
I don't know what this means, but I think you are confusing moral beliefs with moral facts.
>It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes.
The idea that all contentful statements reduce to statements about the outcome of experiment or observation is (again) essentially the one that the logical positivsts put forward. It turned out to be wrong, for reasons which are well documented for anyone who is interested.
Personally, I don't find it inconceivable at all that it's possible to make a statement about "this" reality without referring to an observation or experiment. "It is wrong to kill people for no reason" is clearly a statement pertaining to reality which has no connection with any particular observation or experiment.
Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.
> The chemists methods were (typically) scientific and rational, even though they did not reach a good understanding of chemistry using these methods for quite some time.
They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening. When solving chemical equations, you must take into account atomic numbers, which they did long before knowing about atoms. There's no a priori reason why certain compounds must always be in certain proportions. All they knew is it worked well.
> Certainly, if our brains were different we might have different moral beliefs, but that does not imply that those beliefs would be equally correct.
So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct? Geometry has real world consequences that don't change if brain structure changes. Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.
> I am curious, though, why you are so sure that moral facts must be reducible to physical facts.
It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes. If you claim moral beliefs aren't based on reality then clearly they're arbitrary.