Saturday, December 10, 2011

Descartes, Moore, Whatevs!

On Nature's website:

“Descartes said that if there's something you can be certain of in this world, it's that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson.
Um, whoops! Descartes said that what he couldn't doubt was his own thinking. It was G.E. Moore who famously said it would be absurd to suggest that he didn't know that "here is a hand".

Descartes, G.E. Moore, whatever! It's only philosophy, after all -- not something worth bothering to get right in the the flagship journal of the natural sciences.

(If I sound prickly, maybe it's because I'm currently on hold with AT&T, about to talk to my eleventh representative in two months about being double billed for internet service.)

Update, Dec. 15: The author of the piece has now corrected the error. It turns out that philosophy is worth getting right after all!

12 comments:

L. A. Paul said...

Nobel laureate in physics to me: "There is no such thing as reality, but it has levels."

your sister said...

How could I not read something you wrote that includes "Whatevs!" in the title? But, now, dear brother, I am worried. Have you considered that AT&T maybe be giving you twice the Internet?! That would be so rad. I would check into it before you get the fees removed. Imagine how super duper big your brain is going to get if you can read everything times two.

Carl said...

Scientists are notoriously crappy at philosophy. Recent examples that come to mind are Hawking saying that philosophy is now obsolete (although he basically reinvented Deism without realizing what he had created) and respected neuroscientist David Eagleman comparing the mind to Kublai Khan in a palace—a literal Cartesian theater.

It's not clear if the problem is bad outreach by philosophers or just that scientists tend to be arrogant by profession.

See my criticisms here: http://blog.carlsensei.com/post/4782335802
And here: http://blog.carlsensei.com/post/1090720874

diotimajsh said...

Ha! I came across that same quote myself a little while ago, and I was kind of confused, because I *really* didn't remember that in Descartes.

Kapitano said...

Ah well, as Frederich Hegel once wrote: "The chinese room is everything that is my experience."

:-S :-)

Tristan Haze said...

And they didn't even convey Moore's thing properly! Makes it look like the ownership of the hand is what's in question. I say we boycott science!

Richard Marshall said...

I notice Dawkins is included in your top 200 philosophers Stanford Encyopedia of Philosophy list. Sigh!

Matt said...

Makes it look like the ownership of the hand is what's in question.

I think that in the early drafts Moore also said something like, "and I can sure as hell know that this here hand isn't someone else's hand. I mean, how would someone else's hand get stuck on my arm?" That was crossed out, w/ a note saying, "no, too obvious, too much like something Descartes would say." Or at least that's what someone who claimed to have gone to the archives told me.

Ed Yong said...

Hi Eric,

I'm the author of the piece. Thanks for pointing out the error - it's now been corrected on the website and a correction will also go out in print.

Ed

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Thanks, Ed! Sorry for playing a little rough. As I mentioned, I was on the phone with AT&T....

Art E Grymes said...

Waitaminute; isn't this shady journalism? As Ed Yong notes, factual error has been corrected in the article. The only problem is that the factual error wasn't Ed Yong's to begin with; it was Henrik Ehrsson's! It seems a bit questionable to change Mr. Ehrsson's quote in order to make him seem more philosophically astute. I say leave it as was, and show Ehrsson for the philosophical dilettante he is!

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

@ Art: Yes, that occurred to me too.

My hope is that Ed was able to determine that Ehrsson misspoke or was misquoted -- though if it was misspeaking, probably the position of the quotes should be shifted to leave the name Moore on the outside of the quotation marks.