Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's Preface
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I SCIENCE AND OBJECTIVE NORMS
- PART II INSTRUMENTAL REASON
- 4 Instrumental Reasons
- 5 Why Instrumental Reasoning Isn't Instrumental
- 6 Instrumental Reasoning and the Methodology of Science
- PART III REASONS AND REASONING
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Instrumental Reasoning and the Methodology of Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's Preface
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I SCIENCE AND OBJECTIVE NORMS
- PART II INSTRUMENTAL REASON
- 4 Instrumental Reasons
- 5 Why Instrumental Reasoning Isn't Instrumental
- 6 Instrumental Reasoning and the Methodology of Science
- PART III REASONS AND REASONING
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Given that only the Gibbardian account is congenial to naturalism, shouldn't that be the account to prefer, even if, as I've discussed, it is an account that fails to accord with our intuitions and implies an error theory of our judgments of practical reason? In this section, I want to argue that this is not so, on the grounds that the naturalists' conception of science, as well as their argument against objective moral theory, actually assumes a Kantian conception of the authority of the imperatives of reason constitutive of its methods. If this conclusion is right, it will establish that any science-based argument against the idea of objective normative authority is self-refuting. For if we conclude on scientific grounds that such authority doesn't exist, we do so on the basis of the rational methods of science that turn out to assume this same authority. This refutation only works if it illicitly assumes what it claims to refute.
To begin, consider why naturalists are so convinced that we ought to believe what scientists tell us, rather than what, say, astrologers or magic-users or mystics tell us. What makes only the scientists authorities about the world, and these other people (at best) merely colorful and amusing cultural phenomena?
Is the only possible answer to this question one that makes reference merely to the way in which our culture has made us (and taught us) that scientists are “authorities”? Such an answer is Gibbardian in the sense that it explains our sense that “we ought to believe what scientists say” as deriving from a norm whose content is a cultural creation, and whose authority over us is (merely) a psycho-social phenomenon.
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- The Authority of Reason , pp. 207 - 214Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998