[ExI] experimental philosophy

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mar 30, 2016, at 2:57 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ​I am touchily territorial about psychology.  My colleagues have discovered an incredible number of things about the human mind and human behavior, and I want them to get the credit.  
> 
> A Nobel Prize was awarded in the 50s for the split brain research, which was all psychological after the actual surgery.  But of course there is no prize for psychology, so they gave it for medicine.

Bill already responded on this; Nobel is kind of set up the way it is by the whim of its founder. Like Bill mentioned, there's no Nobel in math. (IIRC, Nobel didn't think math of practical import.:@)

> Now here's Kahneman and Tversky getting a Nobel for behavioral economics, which again should be in psychology because their work has implications far beyond​ economics (which isn't much a science anyway, but you can't blame the Nobel committee for that).  No question that their work deserves a Nobel.
> 
> Now there's experimental philosophy trying to grab some of the limelight.  Are we going to pick the psychology department apart and distribute its work to other departments?  
> 
> I applaud any good scientific work done with humans re psychology.  But to call it something other than psychology is just playing with words and taking credit where it isn't due.

I'm not sure experimental philosophy is merely just psychology by other means. It's a rather new field and I see it as more a mashup between several concerns, only some of which seem to interface directly with psychology or with philosophy of mind. The basic idea in my understanding is to let more empirical methods inform the discussion. But this kind of presumes that all other philosophers are allergic to data, which seems to not be the case in my experience, especially not in philosophy of science or philosophy of mind. 

Forgive me if I'm exceeding post limits on this subject. I'll avoid posting again until tomorrow.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst
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