<<
> Murray sounds a lot like Saint-Simon two centuries ago: physics is
> advancing so quickly -- soon there will be a science of social laws that
> is just as predictive! Yeah, it's just around the corner.
>
Also sounds a good deal like that esteemed founder of _The Economist_, Sir
Walter Bagheot. He had a book called _Physics and Politics_ that made much
the same argument.
>>
Not to mention one Karl Marx, whose major work was devoted to an account of "the natural laws of capitalist production," and who was confident that these laws could be stated "with the precision of the natural sciences."
I don't mean to be a bore here, and although I spend years working and publishing in the area, I'm not all that interested in it any more, but I thought I'd mention a couple of things about the snide comments about hard-edged mind-brain materialism that have been posted on this list.
First of all, it is the traditional Marxist view and was certainly held by Marx insofar as he bothered to think about it. He took over materialism of this sort from Feuerbach, and apparently thought that F had settled the question definitively. It was held by virtually all the great Marxist theorists in some form, for whom the denial of any sort of dualism or even any antireductionism was a kind of dogma.
I am not making an argument from authority, but only pointing out that if this view is obviously stupid, it was a stupid view held by a lot of smart people who thought, moreover, that it was part and parcel of a general materialist perspective on the world. It's not a popular position today, but it's certainly a respectable position. It is, moreover, not a traditionally right wing view at all, whatever Murray (an ignorant fool) may think.
The Churchlands, whom Ken sneered at, although they don't qualify as great Marxist theorists, were, when I knew them, on the far left, and also held this view. And although _I_ don't qualify as a great Marxist theorist on either count, I too once wrote a longish dissertation and published several papers arguing for reductive materialism. I no longer think the question is particularly important, at least I am not exercised by it any more. but the view might still be true. The objections to it are pretty uniformly bad.
My own view is that it's a scientific question: if the cog scientists can explain thought in physical terms, that will settle the question, and if they can't in another 100 years, the prospect for the view will look more dim. All those of us who don't want to do empirical cog sci, kill rats and cats and look at their brains, etc., can do is wait and see.
Second, cognitive neuroscientists will not blink at you stupidly if you ask them what they mean by thought or whether they can explain it. They will, in fact, tell you more than you wish to know about the physical basis of mental states, which is their main study, and they have made a really impressive amount of progress. When I started working in the philosophy side of this area in the late 1970s there was some good work on it, but it has simply exploded so much that you have to be on it full time (rather like the Churchlands) to even keep up with the literature. By the time I lost interest in the early 1990s, the progress in answering questions that seemed intractable 10 or 15 years earlier was really impressive.
Anyway, trashing the view because Murray thinks it has rightwing implications is a pretty dumb thing to do, and I wish you wouldn't.
--jks