Posted: May 11, 2016 8:16 pm
igorfrankensteen wrote:
The word 'principle' in particular, has different shades of meaning and different attributes, depending on the context.
It's a bit similar to the way that the word 'theory' is used. If you try to slip from the hard scientific meaning of the word, into the common street meaning, and then back again, you will either be purposely lying, or simply making a fool of yourself.
Same thing with the word 'principle.' Applying the rigorous requirements of the Scientific context to 'principle,' when you aren't talking about a scientific subject area, is dishonest. So is playing things the other way.
The overall concept of 'principle,' is the idea of starting point; or foundation, or first requirement, or source of other derived things. When establishing a personal philosophy, it is not required that 'principles' have "experimental evidence" to back them up or "prove" them. They only have to be the philosophers' STARTING POINT and FOUNDATION, such that they do not shift or change for him/her depending on the circumstances.
The nearest thing to an overarching principle available at the moment does seem to be the likelihood that the material world, including human brains, can be entirely described in terms of the mathematical laws of physics and chemistry. So far, scientists are nowhere near actually achieving such a description of human (or any other) brains, but all the evidence suggests that such a description is possible. This undercuts any attempt to derive first principles from any other intuitions we may have.
From your earlier posts, you are referring in particular to moral principles in this thread, and especially to the way that people often use and bend principles to their own advantage? Since scientists don’t begin to understand human brains for practical purposes of prediction in real time, science so far is largely useless for working out or negotiating the details of morality; for discussing moral principles we are stuck with philosophy. At the same time, those moral principles need to be aligned with, or at least not in opposition to, what little is scientifically known about human brains. Anything which opposes the scientific consensus is probably a mistake.
For example, our tendency to set up moral rules to which we hold ourselves and others is almost certainly (for scientific reasons) an evolved adaptation which enables us to cooperate effectively. From this perspective, moral principles no longer have the status of primary constituents of the fabric of the universe which they have traditionally held. We still need to discuss moral principles in non-scientific terms (because we need to cooperate, and neuroscience is so far almost useless at that level of detail), but we also need to accept the scientific evidence that our moral principles are an aspect of our biology. They are not clear fundamental principles, but messy rules of thumb which depend, like the rest of human behaviour, on a combination of evolved hard-wiring with ongoing calculation and argument. We often need to argue and negotiate with each other, and occasionally, as Joshua Greene’s work shows, with ourselves, to come up with moral principles that work well enough. Science may help with this, so I think that Calilasseia’s posts about Greene’s work were relevant. I find myself agreeing with Wikipedia here:
Wikipedia wrote:….. evolutionary psychology's primary focus is to derive, especially through the deep analysis of hunter-gatherer culture and primate models, what is the most accurate description of general human predispositions (i.e. our innate "hard-wiring"). And as this understanding grows, it will become more and more feasible to redesign culture itself to be more "user friendly" to its human members, according to some standard . After all, in the ultimate sense, culture (like a computer) is a tool to serve its users. Noted primatologist Frans De Waal asserts, "In the words of Edward Wilson, biology holds us "on a leash" and will let us stray only so far from who we are. We can design our life any way we want, but whether we will thrive depends on how well the life fits human predispositions" [9] Thus, the goals of evolutionary psychology overlap with the science of morality.
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