According to an article appearing today in the New York Times, the Molyneux problem has been answered by neuroscientists. What's the Molyneux problem? It's a question first posed by an Irish politician and scientist, William Molyneux. His question concerns what would happen if a blind person were suddenly given the ability to see. Presented with two objects, a sphere and a cube, would the blind person be able to tell which was which just by looking? He already had tactile experience of these objects. Is that experience sufficient to allow him to make the distinction on the basis of visual perception? Locke famously said that the blind man would not. The recent finding vindicates Locke. Five children from northern India who had been blind from birth but whose vision was restored through surgery were not able to match objects they had touched with one they had seen, they did no better than would be expected if they were just guessing.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Philosophical problem solved by neuroscientists
This result raised broader questions. Does it show that the Molyneux problem was not a philosophical problem to begin with? Can a philosophical problem be answered empirically? Maybe some can and some can't. What implications, if any, should we draw, then, for the nature of philosophy and philosophical problems?
Posted by michael papazian at 8:43 AM
Labels: epistemology, neuroscience
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7 comments:
So, I posted a response, but received an error message upon posting and could not recover it. Unfortunate. I'll try to consolidate for my second attempt.
What is a philosophical problem? It's not, at face value, clear to me that the Molyneux problem was a philosophical problem from the outset. Perception is necessarily (per definition, I believe) a posteriori, contingent upon empirical nature. That seems to put it in the realm of science, just like the questions of color blindness and of the human ability to add. It's one thing to ask, "can humans do math?"; it's another to ask, "what is math?", and this question seems more like the former than the latter.
If the human brain functioned differently, could the outcome of this experiment been different? If so, it would seem to be a scientific problem, not a philosophical problem, as it's contingent upon empiricism, not logic.
I may have performed a convoluted exercise in begging the question, but it's difficult to raise the philosophical problem about the nature of philosophical problems. Thanks for the great blog post.
My understanding of the philosophical problem of perception is its phenominology. Basically the concious state of perception, which in this case sight, feels like "something". from what I can tell I don't think this existential problem is clearly owned by either a priori or a posteriori knowledge and anything that can help outline this issue either way would be a big help.I think I agree with Zach here that it is going to far to say that the neuroscientists in this case solved a philosophical issue here. But I do think that scientists in this case are a tool that has helped outline the philosophical problem more distinctnly; or at the very least opened the door to the possibility that, whatever that "something" feeling of perception is, that it certainly has an a posteriori element to it.
This is very, very cool!
Thanks for your comments...
Zach indicates that facts about perception are empirical, and thus not philosophical. The Molyneux problem is a question about what inferences humans can make about objects as perceived by one sense modality from experiences of that object through another sense modality. Philosophical questions are more basic and conceptual. So that means that attempts to address philosophical problems by empirical methods, as those working in experimental philosophy try, are misguided. Is that a fair assessment of your position?
rjm mostly agrees with Zach that the philosophical problem concerns the nature of consciousness and the sense or feeling of perception. That's how I understand the phenomenological aspect. But he thinks science can help in this philosophical endeavor, though it can't settle issues by itself.
Thanks also to rabidsnakemonkey.
My question is sort of problematic, as it assumes that there is a fixed meaning of "philosophy." The word today refers to a much smaller set of questions than it did in Locke's time. Before we can answer the question we must figure out if there is a distinct discipline of philosophy with its own set of problems, or if the term has no clear definition but also includes questions that inhabit a gray area between science and philosophy.
Dr. Papazian,
Thanks, very much, for the response. I believe that your summary was a fair assessment of the position I was defending. I agree that, in order to answer the question, we must be operating in a sort of paradigm (with apologies to Kuhn) concerning the nature of philosophy. It's a difficult question with several answers that seem coherent, and it's unclear which of the options is most preferable. I have yet to read a defense of empirical/experimental philosophy that I would personally consider to be persuasive, but I may have simply not yet encountered such an argument, despite its existence.
maybe the presence of emperical/ experimental philosophy is evidence of a paradigm shift? It seems that the ability to use deductive reasoning to analyze emperical data may have a utility that the 'old' way of thinking does not. This would be even more important nowadays with the emphasis of having a working knowledge of math and science to be successfull in our culture.
Dr. Papazian,
regarding problematic concern, why not both? in other words, is it problematic to hold both a fixed meaning of philosophy while also dabbling in the gray area? Doing both seems like a great way to help classify and delineate the traditional philosophical issues from the scientific ones.
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